World of the Lost Part 1: Brave New World
by Philip S
Summary: A world that has never known about the existence of super beings becomes a new home to some forgotten heroes. Only some people are not happy about these newcomers and plan to do something about it. FINALLY UPDATED!
1. Arrivals

World of the Lost #1: Brave New World 1/20  
  
by Philip S.  
  
Disclaimer: Supergirl and other DC characters are copyright DC Comics. Other characters appearing in this story are copyright Wildstorm Productions. No infringement is intended.  
  
Summary: A world that has never known about the existence of super beings becomes a new home to some forgotten heroes. Only some people are not happy about these newcomers and plan to do something about it.  
  
Rating: R  
  
Author's Notes: As I am using characters from the DC Silver Age's Earths 1 and 2 I tried to put together a sort-of chronology for the events on those two Earths. While this was not that difficult for Earth-2, which followed a rather straight-forward timeline starting with Superman's original debut in 1938, it was extremely hard for Earth-1. Supergirl's arrival on Earth, for example, took place in 1959 (at least that was when the comic came out) and she was 15 at that time (at least according to Supes' comment in Crisis #7). Which would have made her 41 at the time of the Crisis (1985), which seems way too old to me. Clearly the history of Earth-1 was fluent (though probably not as much as that of the current DC universe) and events moved forward in time as the years progressed. The history I am using was created from bits and pieces gathered from various comics and the internet and I tried to stay true to the order, if not the exact dates, of the various events. If you spot any glaring continuity errors or such please let me know.  
  
#  
  
Part 1: Arrivals  
  
#  
  
The year 2003:  
  
It started with what was later called an 'inexplicable atmospheric phenomenon'. For several hours large parts of the world were overcast by crimson storm clouds, the skies taking on the colour of blood. Lightning that was black as ink thundered down and caused quite a bit of property damage and some loss of life. Doomsayers on every street corner screamed that the end of the world was finally here and that everyone should repent, lest they be cast into hell.  
  
The crimson clouds vanished without a trace, though, and the world continued to exist with no perceptible change. Records actually showed that this was not the first time this strange phenomenon had appeared. For several days back in July of 1985 similar clouds had appeared over wide areas of the world, causing quite a bit of panic and professional interest. These clouds, too, had eventually disappeared without a trace.  
  
Many people would speculate that these two events might be connected, maybe part of some kind of cyclic astronomical occurrence they had yet to figure out. Theories would abound, numerous investigations would be launched, but today's scientists would have no more luck figuring out why the skies turned crimson than those back in 1985. Eventually the phenomenon would be forgotten, filed away as a mere curiosity.  
  
Only a handful of people would ever find out what these two events meant and what they would unleash upon this unsuspecting world.  
  
#  
  
Sarah Mason had worked in the Metropolis Public Library for nearly ten years now and was quite familiar with all possible types of library visitors, or so she had always thought. There were those who hurried through the stacks, searching for a single book, and then left. Others spent hours browsing through several books concerning a single topic, taking their time and reading the day away. Still others seemed to visit for the sole purpose of breaking the age-old rule that it had to be quiet inside a library.  
  
Sarah was uncertain, though, where to put the young woman who had arrived early in the morning and been here ever since. At first she had pecked her for a student, though an older one (late twenties maybe?), doing research for a paper or something. After nearly eight hours, though, in which she had seen the woman browsing through books of such various topics as history, technology, social development, quantum theory, and about a dozen others, as well as making extensive use of the newspaper archives, Sara was rather certain that this was a type of visitor she had never seen before.  
  
It was almost as if this young woman was trying to assimilate the sum total of the world's knowledge in the span of a day. That was nonsense, of course. Sara had seen how this woman read, if one could even call it that. Either she had developed an extremely fast form of speed reading or, more likely, she was simply leafing through the books in search of pictures. No one could read that fast, after all.  
  
Maybe she was doing this because of a bet? Spend an entire day in the library looking busy or you have to do ... well, something really icky.  
  
Interestingly the woman had seemed genuinely clueless when Sarah had asked her if she wanted to use one of the library's internet terminals. It was as if she had never before heard of the internet. Maybe she was from some sort of Amish village? Out of touch with all technology beyond the horse cart? Possibly. Sarah explained to her how to use the terminal and within a few minutes she was surfing like an old hand. Smart, Sarah judged, just uneducated.  
  
Lovely blonde hair, too. Not fake, either.  
  
#  
  
The blonde woman's name was Kara Zor-El. Truth to tell she had long considered shortening that name to just Kara-El. Zor-El was her father's name and it had been tradition on Krypton, her home world, for females to carry the full name of their father as last name. Krypton, a world that had developed far more rapidly in the technological than the social areas, had not survived long enough for this rather patriarchal system to die out.  
  
She had two other names, actually. One was the name she had adopted on the planet Earth, a secret identity that would allow her to move freely among the people of her adopted world without drawing too much attention. That name was Linda Lee Danvers. As of late, though, Kara had come to regard the identity of Linda as more of a burden than an advantage, had even considered dispensing with it entirely.  
  
Her third and final name had been given to her by Earth's media during her first public appearance. It was a name she still carried, even though she was no longer a girl but a fully grown woman. Still, she had to admit that Superwoman sounded rather cumbersome and she did not really have a problem with most people still addressing her by the name she had become famous under: Supergirl.  
  
Right now, though, she was feeling anything but super. Come to think of it she did not remember another time in her life when she had felt this lost. The many books on the table in front of her seemed to mock her, spelling out the history of a world that was clearly not her own. This was Earth, yes, but not the Earth she came from.  
  
Kara had long known about the existence of the multiverse, of course. Parallel worlds, separated by a difference in quantum vibration, each looking a lot like the other, yet quite different in the details. Unlike her cousin Kal she had not travelled much between these alternate Earths, but she did know her way around.  
  
She also knew that this planet, this particular version of Earth, should not exist.  
  
The events were still etched into her mind with perfect crystal clarity. The Anti-Monitor. The worst threat that she or any other superhero on any Earth had ever faced. A nearly omnipotent cosmic despot, absolute ruler of the anti-matter universe of Qward, he had sought to eliminate all the positive-matter universes in order to expand his own supremacy. With every universe that died in his anti-matter storms his power grew until he seemed all but unstoppable.  
  
Kara still shuddered when thinking about the billions upon billions of lives this insane madman had destroyed. Thousands of universes had been annihilated before a force strong enough to oppose him had arisen. A veritable army of superheroes from all surviving worlds, gathered from different eras of time, had invaded the anti-matter universe and attacked the Anti-Monitor's fortress, looking to put an end to his tyranny once and for all.  
  
The attack had nearly ended in disaster. Honesty compelled Kara to admit that, even now, she did not know whether or not it had been a success. Most of the heroes had been kept busy by the Anti-Monitor's defences and it been Kal, her cousin, who had faced the madman alone. Yes, he was Superman, one of the most powerful beings in any world, but it had not been enough. The Anti-Monitor had beaten him to a pulp and raised his fist for the killing blow. At that moment something had snapped inside Kara.  
  
Kal was family, one of but very few surviving Kryptonians, and the man who had been both mentor, surrogate-father, and best friend to her for most of her life. To defend him she had disregarded every principle he had ever taught her. She wanted to kill this creature that threatened her cousin, wanted to rip him into pieces and scatter them into the void with every bit of superhuman strength she possessed. It did not matter that he was a living being. The blood of billions was on his hands and the only way to save the worlds that were left was to kill him every bit as ruthlessly as he had killed so many others.  
  
She might even have succeeded. Never before had she unleashed her full powers on any single being. The Anti-Monitor, winded by his battle against Superman, had been taken by surprise. She had cracked open his protective armour, had pounded him into the floor. She would never know for sure, of course, but she was convinced that she could have finished him off.  
  
Her compassion had been her undoing. Not for the Anti-Monitor, no, but for her cousin. She had instructed Doctor Light, the only other hero in reach of the battle, to get Kal to safety. In a moment of carelessness she had turned around to see whether Light had done as she told her. That moment had been all the Anti-Monitor needed.  
  
Kara still remembered the pain, a pain so intense she wanted to die on the spot if only it would put an end to it. The Anti-Monitor had torn into her with a strength that had already crushed universes and she was helpless before it. Her vaunted invulnerability failed, skin that could not be harmed by the fury of a star cracked open, bones that could have supported the weight of a world broke. She fell to the ground, bleeding and torn up inside, certain that this was the end.  
  
The last thing she remembered was Kal, kneeling over her, telling her that she had succeeded in destroying the Anti-Monitor's doomsday machine, now she just had to hold on. She remembered telling him that she loved him, telling him not to cry. Then nothing.  
  
She died, or so she had assumed at that moment. The pain had vanished and everything around her had slid away into darkness. She had waited for Rao, the Kryptonian deity, to take her into his arms and carry her away into the afterlife. Only it had not happened that way. The next thing she had known was the feeling of rain on her skin, the rumble of a thunderstorm overhead.  
  
Kara had awoken in a field, lying beneath a sky filled with crimson clouds. The same crimson clouds that had heralded the Crisis and the coming of the Anti-Monitor. Fear had filled her being, even when she found herself miraculously unharmed. Had the monster returned? Had it beaten the others and come to Earth to finish the job? This was Earth, that much she recognised almost immediately. Was her adopted world still in danger?  
  
The storm clouds had passed, though, fading away without much ado. Kara had no idea how she had made it back to Earth, how her injuries had healed so rapidly, or what had happened to her costume. The supposedly indestructible fabric had, of course, not fared any better against the Anti-Monitor's attack than her own skin and there had not been much left of it by the time he dropped her bleeding body to the ground. Whatever had remained must have been lost during the strange journey that had brought her here.  
  
That, at least, was a problem quickly remedied. The nearest city was but a short flight away and Kara snatched a couple of clothes from a department store at super speed without anyone even seeing her. She felt guilty about stealing the clothes, but resolved to reimburse the store the moment she got home.  
  
Only home was not where it was supposed to be. At the speeds she was travelling it did not take her long to realise this. She had planned to make a short trip to her apartment in Chicago, just long enough to snatch a spare custom, and then head towards the Monitor's satellite to find out what had happened with the battle, to check whether the others were all right.  
  
Her apartment building was not there any longer, in its place stood a modern office tower. The Monitor's satellite was not in orbit, at least nowhere she could find it, and the greatest shock came when she flew to the arctic and found no trace of Superman's Fortress of Solitude.  
  
For a moment she almost panicked, but quickly calmed down again when she realised what must have happened. In the course of the Crisis the five surviving universes, each with their own version of the planet Earth, had been joined together in a so-called Netherverse, a safe haven against the anti-matter constructed by the Monitor and the woman known as Harbinger. That had to be the answer. This was one of the four other Earths, a planet similar, yet not identical to her own.  
  
Another shock had assailed right on the heels of that calming realisation, caused by her first glance at a calendar. It was the year 2003, eighteen years in the future. It took her even less time to recover from this revelation, though. As a Kryptonian she could fly faster than light and crack the time barrier under her own power. So what if someone or something had thrown her eighteen years into the future? She could still make her way home without too much trouble.  
  
Or so she had thought.  
  
Before diving blindly into the time stream or cracking the dimensional barriers Kara had resolved to find out exactly where she was. She did not know much about the other four Earths that had survived the Crisis, but at the very least she knew which heroes had come from which planet. So the only thing she had to do was find a record of this world's superheroes and she would know all she needed to know. Then she could travel back eighteen years and make her way back to her own Earth.  
  
That had been almost ten hours ago. Now Kara sat at a table, filled with knowledge, and was more clueless than ever.  
  
This world did not have any superheroes. In fact, judging by these books and what she had found in this 'internet' the librarian had shown her, the mere concept of a superhero was something that did not exist in this world, at least not outside a comic book. Which should be impossible. She knew, knew without a shadow of a doubt, that only five worlds remained in the multiverse. All five of these had superheroes, heroes the public was aware of. She should have found some records. Records of the Justice League, the Justice Society, the Freedom Fighters, the Marvel Family, or at least that strange group the hero known as Blue Beetle had belonged to.  
  
None of them existed here. Which, impossible as it might seem, suggested that this was not one of the five Earths she knew of. Which also suggested that this world should not exist, should have been destroyed by anti-matter storms more than eighteen years ago. Yet here it was, solid and real.  
  
She considered the idea that maybe it actually was one of the surviving five Earths, that something had happened these last eighteen years to eradicate all knowledge of superheroes. Well, that should be easy enough to find out. A simply jaunt into the past would answer that question.  
  
Kara headed for the bathroom and flew out the window, moving at speeds too high for anyone to spot her. Traversing the time barrier was not that difficult if one had the ability to exceed light speed. The atmosphere was left behind within seconds and Kara accelerated, expecting to see the rainbow colours of the time stream appear around her every moment now.  
  
It did not happen. She flew many times the speed of light, saw the familiar time dilating effects around her, but that was simple physics. The jaunt into the time stream did not occur, no matter how hard she tried, and after several minutes (subjectively) she broke off the attempt.  
  
Kara was starting to be genuinely scared. Not only had something snatched her away from certain death and deposited her on this strange world, she was also cut off from the time stream. In desperation she tried to crack the dimensional barriers. She had only done this a few times before, always with Kal there to guide her through it, but she remembered how it worked. Adjust your internal vibrations until they matched that of the other universe. Kara began to vibrate at a speed that would have made the Flash proud and tried to switch universes, not caring what world she might end up in as long as something actually happened.  
  
Nothing did.  
  
For a long moment Kara was almost overwhelmed by despair, but then resolved herself again. Okay, so she was stuck in this time, this dimension. She was still Supergirl, still one of the most powerful superheroes around. Someone or something had brought her here and odds were that it would also be able to take her back. The Crisis seemed to have passed this world by, otherwise it would have ceased to exist, yet it had experienced the same crimson storm clouds her own world had endured in the months preceding the Anti- Monitor's attack.  
  
There was a connection there, she was sure of it. That connection was her ticket home. With her resolve thus renewed Kara quickly accelerated back towards Earth where, due to the time dilation, several hours had passed in the few minutes she had been away. Night had fallen over the eastern seaboard and the library had no doubt closed by now. Kara allowed herself a small smile. The librarian would probably be ticked at the thoughtless young woman who simply left all those books lying around without putting them back. If only she knew.  
  
Zipping back into Earth's atmosphere at speeds too great for any satellite or flight control radar to pick her up, Kara decided to find a place to rest first. She was tired, extremely so. Her wounds might have been healed, but she was still worn out from the battle and ten hours of concentrating on books and computer screens had not done much to improve that situation.  
  
Too tired to conduct a long search for accommodations, she simply dropped down in what she estimated to be Kansas (a curious choice, her inner voice mumbled) and curled up under a tree. The cold of night did not bother her, nor was she in danger from any animal that might be passing by. She just needed some rest. Maybe everything would make more sense in the morning.  
  
Yeah, maybe.  
  
#  
  
The man tiredly brushed his hand through his greying hair and sighed, sitting down at the table opposite the young woman he had come here with. They were inside an internet café and it had taken neither of them long to figure out how to use this vast fountain of information. Neither of them liked what they had found there, though.  
  
"Nothing?" the woman asked, her face a mask of bitterness and fear.  
  
The man simply shook his head. In so many ways this situation was one big déjà vu for them. According to the calendar eighteen years had passed, but for them it had been but a few hours since they had found themselves on a world that had no place for them. Only a handful of people, their fellow superheroes with whom they had fought at the dawn of time, even remembered their existence. To everyone else they were less than a dream, a forgotten memory of something that had never taken place.  
  
Then there had been yet another battle, yet another attack by the monster that had doomed so many people. The Anti-Monitor's shadow demons had come upon the Earth like a plague and they both remembered their burning touch, remembered being cornered in an alley, trying to protect some children. They remembered the Titan Kole, trying to shield them with a wall of crystal.  
  
It had not been enough. The shadows had burned them, swallowed them. They had both been certain that this was it. The world had forgotten them and now they would die, probably not even leaving a corpse.  
  
Instead they had woken up here.  
  
"I don't know where we are," Richard Grayson told Helena Wayne, "but it's no place I recognize."  
  
TO BE CONTINUED 


	2. Undercover

Part 2: Undercover  
  
#  
  
"Dr. Zarin?"  
  
The elderly scientist turned around upon hearing the female voice calling his name, rather delighted to see it belonging to a rather beautiful young woman. She was blonde, either natural or one of the better dye jobs he had ever seen, and wore her hair tied back in a loose ponytail. A pair of wire spectacles was balanced on her nose, giving her a cute, academic look. She was dressed somewhere between casual and business attire and had a notepad in her hand, a pen tucked behind her ear.  
  
A reporter, he mused. Definitely one of the prettier ones.  
  
"That is me, my dear," he gave her a small bow. "How can I be of service?"  
  
Samuel Zarin was the chief scientist of S.T.A.R. laboratories meteorological division and quite busy these days. As the premiere research facility in the western world many people had turned to S.T.A.R. to find answers for the strange crimson storms that had cast their shadows over the world just over a week ago. Reporters aplenty had been in and out of the building these last eight days and kept Zarin and his people from properly concentrating on his work.  
  
Not that he would have minded too much if the reporters were all as pretty as this one.  
  
"My name is Karen Kell, reporter for The Daily Planet. I was hoping you had the time to answer a few questions."  
  
"The Planet?" Zarin asked, frowning. "I believe someone from your paper was already here right after the clouds first appeared."  
  
"I know," Kell said, smiling. "That was for the headline news directly after the storm. Now that the initial buzz has faded a bit we want to do a more scientific piece on the whole thing. According to our archives this is the second time such storms have appeared, correct? Unless I'm very much mistaken you were involved in the research back in 1985, too."  
  
Zarin gave her an appreciative look. Not too many reporters had bothered with actually doing their homework on this. Eighteen years ago he had in fact been involved in researching the curious appearance of these crimson storms, though he had not been the chief scientist back then.  
  
"Quite right, Ms. Kell," he said, motioning for her to follow him into his office. It was about time to take a break anyway, so he might as well spend it talking to a nice young lady.  
  
"I'm afraid the Planet's archives did not contain much in the way of information about what you found out back then." Kell sat down on the chair facing his desk as Zarin sat down behind it.  
  
"As much as I would like to blame your archives for that, it is hardly their fault. We did not learn much about the storms back then. Not what caused them, nor whether they might appear again. We did not even get good satellite shots of them. Thankfully today's equipment is a little bit better."  
  
"So did you find out anything?"  
  
Zarin shrugged. "We are still looking over the collected data, actually. There is quite a bit of it and, well, we are able to work a lot faster now that the initial media attention has died down. No offence meant."  
  
"None taken. I know the press can be a bother."  
  
As he went on to explain what little they had found out so far, Dr. Zarin was pleasantly surprised to find that the young woman sitting opposite him had more to herself than her looks. She did not seem put out by any of the scientific jargon he pitched her way and her questions clearly showed that she knew what they were talking about.  
  
The storms, as far as they could tell so far, were the result of some kind of ripple in the space-time continuum, quite possibly caused by a supernova or some other stellar event. Basically it meant that somewhere a tremendous amount of energy had been released and the shockwave had made its way across space to reach the Earth, causing the atmospheric disturbance.  
  
As to what had actually caused this ripple was anyone's guess, though.  
  
"Wouldn't a stellar event the likes of which you described," Kell asked, "be noticed by astronomers? A star going nova, two stars colliding, something like that should have been visible in the skies, right?"  
  
"Yes, but someone would have had to actually look in that direction at the moment. There is quite a bit of sky to watch, Ms. Kell, and even all the telescopes and satellites of the world combined can barely account for about ten percent of it. It is entirely possible that we simply did not notice the event. It is equally possible that it was something that did not produce any visible light. Something like a black hole or such."  
  
Kell made a bit of a face, looking almost frustrated.  
  
"Do you think you will find out what it was?"  
  
Zarin hesitated a moment, then sighed. "I don't actually believe so. The data we have gathered might tell us what kind of event it was or what exactly happened to cause the clouds to turn crimson, but the exact nature of the trigger event? Well, we'd have to be very lucky there."  
  
#  
  
Kara resisted the urge to groan in frustration. Dr. Zarin was a nice enough man, but of very little help. She had hoped that S.T.A.R. labs would be able to give her some insight into the nature of her arrival here, which she never doubted was connected with the manifestation of the crimson storm clouds. The trigger event, as he called it, was clearly the Crisis, the destruction of so many alternate universes that had somehow passed this world by. She could not exactly tell him that, of course.  
  
What Zarin did not know was that she had already taken a look at the data his people were sifting through even now. At the speeds she was capable of it had taken her only a few minutes to read it all and, even though she was nowhere near the genius Kal was, she had managed to make sense of most of it. Unfortunately none of it told her what she wanted to know: How to recreate this effect and make it take her back home.  
  
That was why she was here now. Creating the identity of Daily Planet reporter Karen Kell had not been that difficult. Earth's computer technology had progressed quite a bit these last eighteen years, but for someone who had grown up in a Kryptonian city it was still backward. Add to that her speed, enabling her to sneak into most public record buildings without anyone noticing, and Karen Kell had been born with very little fuss.  
  
The hardest part had been getting a job at a newspaper, but she had been in luck there. The Planet, the paper that, in her world, was the employer of her cousin, had been looking for a new staff writer for their weekly science insert. With her photographic memory and extensive knowledge Kara had had no trouble acing the interview and getting the job. It also provided her with a much-needed source of income.  
  
She had hoped that the S.T.A.R. scientists might have gained some insights from the data that had escaped her, but it seemed this was not the case. For a moment she considered telling Zarin that the origin of this phenomenon was not a stellar, but rather a dimensional event, but then decided against it. She would not be able to make him believe her unless she revealed what she was, and that was something she did not plan on doing any time soon. This world did not know about the existence of aliens or super beings and the last thing she needed was to cause a worldwide uproar.  
  
Their talk dragged on, but Kara was barely paying attention any longer. She made some notes, enough to write a reasonably accurate article from, and otherwise kept up her smile and charm. Her thoughts, though, were busy elsewhere. S.T.A.R. was the pre-eminent research facility in the world. If they did not know anything then who could she turn to next?  
  
One of the alien races she knew about might hold an answer, being more technologically advanced than humanity. The Thanagarians maybe? Or the Daxamites? Maybe even the Coluans. Brainiac 5's people were supposed to be the smartest guys in the universe, weren't they? If they existed in this universe, that was.  
  
Leaving Earth behind to visit an alien planet was not as easy as it might have been in her own universe, though. She had never memorised a star chart of any kind, knowing that they were readily available at Kal's fortress should she ever need them. Okay, hindsight was always perfect, but she should still have known better than that. It was a neglect that might cost her dearly now.  
  
She almost smiled as she remembered some stories she had read about herself and her abilities. Some people actually thought her telescopic vision allowed her to look to the ends of the universe and back, all of it in real time, of course. She wished it would work that way, then she would have had no trouble locating one of the planets she might find help on. Unfortunately it was not that easy. At the utmost she might strain her senses to focus on a place twenty or so light years away, but even then she would only see what had happened there twenty or so years ago. Physics did not simply cease working, not even for a Kryptonian.  
  
When she finally thanked Dr. Zarin for his time and left she was not even one step closer to finding a solution. Yesterday she had gone over the place she had first appeared in with all of her enhanced senses, but had found nothing helpful. There was a residual trace of energy in the air, a signature she recognized as hailing from matter-anti-matter fusion, but that did not tell her much anything. She had been around a lot of anti- matter just before coming here.  
  
Somewhat discouraged she returned to the small apartment she had rented. It was not much, little more than a medium-sized room with a bed, a small kitchenette, and an adjunct bathroom. She did not plan on a long stay, after all. It might become one despite her plans, of course.  
  
Kara flopped down on the bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to figure out what to do next.  
  
#  
  
It had taken her almost a week to get to Greece, her lack of proper identification preventing her from getting on a plane. She had stowed away on a boat and then on several trains. Not for the first time she wished that she were actually able to fly under her own power instead of just gliding on the winds. It was great for short distances, but crossing an ocean or a continent was not in the cards.  
  
Now she was almost there, though. Just a short trip left and she would be home. Or the closest thing to it that Princess Diana of Paradise Island, better known in her own world as Wonder Woman, would be able to find in this strange place.  
  
By now she had figured out that this Earth was not the one she knew. The complete lack of superheroes was evidence enough all by itself. There were other factors, like the fact that she seemed to have been moved eighteen years into the future.  
  
Had she found the patience to study the history of this new world Diana might have found some more clues, minor discrepancies in history, but in her current state she found it impossible to remain inactive for long or engage in intellectual exercises. She had arrived in this world as the gods created her, bereft of both clothing and weapons. The magical lasso spun from Hestia's girdle was gone, as were the near indestructible bracelets every Amazon wore. The latter weighed far more heavily on her mind right now than the former.  
  
It was the Amazon's curse. Millennia ago their queen had allowed herself to be seduced and then enslaved by Heracles and been punished for it by their gods. From that day forward the Amazons would always wear the bracelets as a symbol of their past shame. If a man should ever chain them together again they would lose all those powers that set them apart from mankind. If they were removed, as hers now were, it would reduce the Amazon in question to an infuriated animal, depriving her of the tenderness and loving nature that was her usual nature.  
  
Diana had lost her bracelets several times before, enabling her to keep a handle on the boundless fury unleashed within her by the curse, but only just. A week of keeping herself in check had worn her down to a quivering bundle of nerves and she was more than ready to pound anyone who even looked at her funny into the ground. She still had the power to do that. The strength of Heracles, the speed of Hermes, the beauty of Aphrodite, those were gifts she retained even here. As for the wisdom of Athena, well, in her current state she doubted it availed her much.  
  
All attempts at getting home would be jeopardised by her barely leashed anger, just like every innocent person that came into range of her temper. Therefor the first and foremost thing she had to do was get her bracelets back. Even with her mind clouded by fury and rage she realised that the chances of finding her original ones were slim. She had clearly been brought across dimensions by some force far beyond herself. Her bracelets could literally be anywhere, if they still existed at all.  
  
Which left her exactly one option. If this world was anything like her own than it would have a Paradise Island and a race of Amazons. Odds were they would not know her, but as sisters they should be willing to help. Maybe they would have a Princess Diana of their own. Everything was possible. Including, of course, that they had never come into existence at all in this world. Well, at the very least Greek mythology here contained the same stories as it did at home.  
  
Home, she mused, the fury that clouded her mind receding for a moment. She remembered her final moments on the world that, though changed, was still her home. There had been so much confusion. Five worlds had merged into one and many a hero had found that this new Earth no longer held a home for him. Thankfully she had not been one of them, but the horror of the untold billions who had perished or simply been erased from existence had shaken her to the core.  
  
Her marriage to Steve Trevor, the man who had originally caused her to abandon Paradise in favour of man's world, was the sole glimpse of light in that dark time. They had tied the knot in desperation, thinking that the world would end tomorrow. Their sole night together as husband and wife and been laced with the need to celebrate their union while they could, passion mixing with abandon as the anti-matter storms roared outside.  
  
Then the final assault on the Anti-Monitor. They had thought he was dead, destroyed when Doctor Light absorbed the power of Qward's dark sun and redirected it against the armoured form of their enemy. Alexander Luthor had opened the gate to their home universe, had told them all to hurry.  
  
Then the Anti-Monitor had risen again and struck. She remembered blazing light exploding forth from his mouth and then ... nothing. Nothing until she woke up here in this strange new world.  
  
The rage returned and introspective thoughts became a thing of the past. She had reached the Greek coast, now all she needed was a boat. She did not think she had ever gone to the island by boat, always using her invisible jet instead. No such thing here, though, leaving her with no alternative.  
  
Hoping that the magical barrier that prevented the island from being found was in the same place here as in her own world, Diana wasted no time knocking out an unsuspecting Greek fisherman and stealing his boat. She would return it later.  
  
TO BE CONTINUED 


	3. Devil in the Details

Part 3: Devil in the Details  
  
#  
  
Karen Kell was sitting at her desk in the Daily Planet staff room, looking to all the world like she was busy typing up her latest article. In her short stint with the paper the young woman had become quite well liked among the staff, even if she was a bit distant at times. She was always friendly and helpful, had a smile for everyone, but did not take part in any of the social activities that occasionally took place. She lived in her own world, it seemed.  
  
Her own world was, in fact, what kept Kara's thoughts busy right now even as she was absentmindedly typing up Karen Kell's latest article, something about the new permanent space station. For a moment her thoughts interposed a picture of the Justice League Satellite over that of the ISS-1. Damn, it was getting increasingly difficult to keep her thoughts compartmentalized and focused on business instead of being overwhelmed by that ever-growing feeling of homesickness.  
  
Working for the Planet gave her access to all kinds of resources to aid in her research and she had made good use of them this past month she had been here. It had actually begun when she had met one of the Planet's senior reporters a few days after being hired, a reporter by name of Lois Lane. Kara had been so surprised by the appearance of the woman she knew as her cousin's girlfriend (at least that was what she probably would be if he ever got around to telling her how he felt) that she had spent a full minute sputtering in confusion as Lois just gave her an amused look. Kara had covered by saying something along the lines of knowing someone who looked almost identical to Lois.  
  
Being naturally curious Lois had asked who this supposed doppelganger was and, playing a hunch, Kara had given her the name Kent. Unfortunately Lois had never heard of anyone by that name, neither male nor female. A short check of the records had also told Kara that no Clark Kent worked or had ever worked for the Daily Planet, either.  
  
Despite that disappointment she was glad to have met the female reporter. Apart from her being a genuinely nice person, seeing Lois had caused Kara to research in a different direction after her ongoing failure to find out anything worthwhile about the crimson clouds. She started looking up all the people she remembered from her world, hoping that one of them might be able to help her.  
  
Jonathan and Martha Kent had been farmers in Smallville, Kansas and had both died some years ago, just like at home. Their deaths had been later in life than Kara remembered it from her world, though, and they had never had children, neither natural nor adopted. There was also not a single record of a meteor or anything of the sort coming down over Smallville within the last hundred years.  
  
There was a Bruce Wayne in Gotham City, quite a few years younger than the one she knew would be in 2003, and his parents had been killed right before his eyes when he was eight. Today he was one of the top profilers for the FBI's violent crimes taskforce. His vast fortune had gone into several foundations and enterprises. There was no trace of the foppish playboy she remembered from her own world, nor did she find any reports or even urban legends about a Batman.  
  
Barbara Gordon, arguably Kara's best friend among the hero crowd back home, had also been in the employ of the FBI for quite a few years, having been recruited directly out of college. Several years ago she had been involved in a raid gone sour and apparently left the FBI shortly afterwards due to a crippling injury. Her current whereabouts or occupation eluded Kara.  
  
Hal Jordan was a former test pilot, now a congressman whom many saw as a top candidate for the presidency within the next ten to fifteen years. He was married to one Carol Ferris, owner and chief executive of Ferris Aircraft, the nation's leading aircraft manufacturer.  
  
Barry Allen was heading the CSI division of the Central City Police Department.  
  
Ray Palmer was a professor at Michigan State University.  
  
The sole record she found when looking up the name Diana Price was that of a former army nurse who now lived in South America with her husband. They had two children.  
  
Practically all the people she had known at home existed in this world, at least those that had actually been born on this planet. Granted, there was a curious shift regarding birth dates and such, most of them seemed to be about the same age she remembered them to be despite this being eighteen years in the future, but she had seen something like this before in the differences between Earth-1 and Earth-2. That was probably just some sort of natural shift between dimensions.  
  
What troubled her more was the fact that none of these people who so resembled her friends and colleagues back home had turned into superheroes. Kara shook her head. Maybe the fact that someone or something had (deliberately?) cut off her access to the time stream and other dimensions had made her paranoid, but it seemed a little too much in the way of coincidence that all these people existed, yet had somehow managed to dodge the circumstances that would have made them superheroes.  
  
She knew that most of them had become heroes through chance. The lightning bolt that had made Barry Allan the Flash could just as easily have struck elsewhere or not at all. If she remembered right Hal Jordan had been given his ring by a dying alien who had crashed to Earth. Maybe it did not crash this time around. Ray Palmer, the Atom, had fashioned his size-changing technology from a meteor that contained a fragment of a white dwarf star. Maybe the white dwarf had never come to Earth. Bruce Wayne had decided to become the Batman after a bat crashed through his window. Maybe the bat had veered off at the last second.  
  
Yeah, all maybes. Becoming a superhero had been a question of being in the right place at the right time for many of her friends and colleagues. What were the odds, though, that she was stranded on a world where every single one of these chance events had not taken place? There were dozens of superheroes in her world and apparently not a single one here. All just chance? She refused to believe that.  
  
If something or someone had manipulated these people into not becoming superheroes ... maybe if she talked to them she could find something of a common thread. Maybe that could lead her to the person or persons behind her stay in this world. Yes, she was probably grasping at straws, she was aware of that. Why would someone manipulate a whole world for the sole purpose of leaving her stranded here? Maybe the whole idea of putting on tights to fight crime had simply never come into fashion here and even those who had superpowers kept them secret, out of the public eye. That could be all there was to it. Still, it was the best plan she could come up with.  
  
Maybe she could schedule some interviews. Her next article for the science insert could be about forensic sciences. Get an expert in Barry Allan. Maybe consult one Ray Palmer for some of the underlying science. Talk to Bruce Wayne on how much a profiler could tell from forensic clues.  
  
Kara was starting to hammer out the details of this new plan when something caught her attention.  
  
"This is the Daily Planet," Perry White barked loud enough to be heard all across the bullpen, "not the bloody tabloids."  
  
The editor-in-chief of the paper, also a familiar face from her own world, could be seen getting into Lois Lane's face behind the door of his office. After his initial outburst he continued in a somewhat lower tone, but Kara's enhanced hearing had no trouble making out the words. They immediately piqued her interest.  
  
"I can't believe someone like you would ask me to print this trash, Lois."  
  
"It's news," Lois Lane retorted, not looking intimidated in the least. "We have half a dozen witnesses who swear that they saw a figure dressed as a bat. We have four criminals in the hospital, beaten to a pulp by parts unknown. They, too, described a masked figure resembling a bat. The Gotham Police Department has put out a warrant for this vigilante."  
  
White grumbled, but Kara was barely listening anymore. A figure dressed as a bat? In Gotham City? Beating up criminals? She quickly sifted through her assembled files until she found Bruce Wayne. Was it possible? Had he become Batman after all, somehow keeping it secret? Had the idea struck him just recently?  
  
Kara made a face. It still did not make any sense. Why just him and no one else? Why now? Well, there was really but one way to find out, wasn't there?  
  
#  
  
Kara waited until late evening to make her way to Gotham, figuring that the Batman (if it really was him) would not be out working until well after dark. The city looked like she remembered it, all high sky scrapers with a mildly gothic design. Downtown was buzzing with night life, all neon lights and pretty colours, but just as many dark shadows for the predators to prowl in.  
  
She made a quick flyby past Wayne Manor, sprawled majestically on a hill overlooking the city. Her x-ray vision found the caves beneath it, but they were completely dark and empty. As was the manor itself, actually. Not fallen to ruin or anything, but clearly uninhabited. She certainly would not find any Batman there.  
  
Seeking out one of the higher rooftops within the city, Kara perched down and concentrated on her senses. Her vision powers would not do her too much good, there were just too many places to hide in a city this big, not to mention quite a bit of lead. Her hearing was another matter, though. Screams was what she was listening for and she did not have to wait long. There were a lot of them in this part of town.  
  
Some statistic suggested that a crime occurred in Gotham about every thirty seconds and Kara quickly found that this was not exaggerated. Within the next hour she observed no less than five muggings, one attempted rape, and three break-ins. She always waited until the last possible second, looking for a hooded figure springing from the darkness, but no such luck. She ended up foiling all of these crimes herself, making sure to move at such speeds that no one caught even a glimpse of her.  
  
Finally, though, she spotted something.  
  
It was another mugging, the sixth of the night for her. Two young men had cornered an elderly couple, threatening them with knives. Kara watched from a nearby roof and was about to intervene when she saw something else. Something moving in the shadows just behind the two muggers. A smile appeared on her lips and she settled down to watch.  
  
The two criminals never knew what hit them. The fight, such as it was, lasted about six seconds before two unconscious bodies dropped to the ground. In a swirl of cape the hooded figure quickly cuffed them, using plastic straps, and told the couple to get out of here. All of this left Kara enough time to take a closer look at this 'Batman'. For a moment a puzzled frown appeared on her face, to be replaced moments later with another, broader smile.  
  
The moment the couple was out of sight she zipped down into the alley and came to a stop directly in front of the masked vigilante, hovering about five inches above the ground. The figure started, looking at her as if it was seeing a ghost.  
  
"I don't think we were ever properly introduced," Kara said. "I'm Supergirl. You're Huntress, right?"  
  
The daughter of Earth-2's Batman just stared at her.  
  
TO BE CONTINUED 


	4. No Longer Alone

Part 4: No Longer Alone  
  
#  
  
Kara had met Helena Wayne only once before that she could remember and that had been right in the middle of the Crisis. Kal had told her quite a bit about her, though, mostly because Kara had been unable to believe that someone like Bruce Wayne, the Batman, could possibly have a daughter, even he it was the Bruce Wayne of another world.  
  
The way he told it Helena had taken up the mantle of the Huntress after her mother, the reformed criminal called Catwoman, had been killed. She had tracked down her murderer and then decided to stay in the vigilante lifestyle, taking the place her father had vacated due to his retirement. She was also a member of Earth-2's Justice Society and, as such, had done quite a bit of travel across dimensions in the course of the annual meetings between the JSA and the Justice League.  
  
A broad smile was on Kara's lips for even this near-stranger she now faced managed to diminish the homesickness she felt in this strange place quite a bit.  
  
"Supergirl?" Helena asked. It was so good to hear someone call her by her name, to meet someone who actually recognised her, that she almost missed the weariness in the Huntress' voice.  
  
Dark eyes regarded the woman hovering in front of her, taking in her clothes. Normal street clothes, not the red and blue costume she remembered, except for the shirt. Partially hidden by the black coat she wore there was the famous S-symbol, slightly different than the one she remembered the Superman of her own world wearing, but still impossible not to recognise.  
  
Helena was the daughter of the greatest detective who had ever lived and he had trained her almost from birth. Her memory was just short of photographic and she never forgot a face, even one she had seen but once in the midst of battle. Without a doubt this was Supergirl, Earth-1's version of one of her best friends, Powergirl.  
  
Only it could not possibly be her.  
  
"I don't blame you for being weary," Kara said when it became evident that the other woman would not stop staring at her anytime soon. "I am guessing you don't know how you happened to end up in this strange world, either, do you?"  
  
She received a nod, at least, though Helena was still not saying anything.  
  
"Appeared here right about a month ago?" Kara asked. "Right in the middle of the same crimson clouds that blanketed our worlds during the Crisis?"  
  
Again a nod.  
  
"This would go a lot better if you took part in the conversation, too, you know?"  
  
Kara set down on the ground and took a step toward Helena, causing the other woman to take a step back. What was wrong with her? Kara's enhanced senses picked up the other woman's accelerated heartbeat, could read the slightest shift in her body language. Why was the Huntress afraid of her?  
  
For a moment the other woman's face was frozen in indecision, then she seemed to make some kind of choice and her stance relaxed. Not completely, no, but she was not liable to spring into attack mode within the next second anymore. Or maybe she had just realised that hand-to-hand combat was not a viable option when faced with a fully-powered Kryptonian.  
  
"I got here one month ago, yes," Helena said, weariness still in her voice. "Appeared right here in Gotham City, too. It took me a bit to figure out that this was not the world I had been in a moment before."  
  
Kara had not stopped monitoring Helena's vital signs and so it was easy for her to tell that the other woman was ... well, not lying, but holding something back. And she was still extremely weary for some reason Kara still could not figure out.  
  
"What say we go somewhere and talk this over?" Kara asked. "A dark alley isn't really the most amiable scenery."  
  
#  
  
The two woman went into a coffee shop, Helena having changed into civilian garb on the way. Kara saw no reason to change her own outfit. Most of what she wore would not attract any attention and the shirt, the only piece of her costume she had chosen to recreate so far, might warrant a curious look or two, but no more than that. The S-symbol was completely unknown here on this Earth.  
  
"The last thing I remember," Kara told Helena, "is fighting the Anti- Monitor. You weren't part of the team that invaded the anti-matter universe, right?" Helena nodded. "Well, it was quite a battle. I ... I still don't know how it ended, really. I managed to destroy the machinery the Anti-Monitor was using to destroy our worlds, but he had beaten me. I ... I was convinced I was going to die and then ... next thing I know I'm here."  
  
She looked up at Helena with a pleading look in her eyes, a month of not knowing the fate of her friends and family catching up with her and shattering the stoic face she had managed to retain so far.  
  
"What happened after that?"  
  
Helena frowned for a moment, but then shrugged. "Everything seemed to return to normal for a while. The five Earths were still partially interspaced, but the danger of them annihilating each other had passed. We were busy with damage control when Luthor and Brainiac assembled a huge army of villains to try and take over all five Earths at once. They actually managed to conquer three of them before we managed to retaliate.  
  
"The battle was brought to a halt right about the time we managed to turn the tide. The Spectre returned to tell us that the Anti-Monitor still lived. Apparently he had travelled back to the beginning of time, looking to change all of creation right from the start to make it so that there never was a multiverse to being with, only his own anti-matter universe."  
  
Kara looked stunned, but listened intently.  
  
"We gathered everyone together and followed him. It was tough and go for a while, but ... well, I'm still not sure exactly what happened, but suddenly we were all back on Earth."  
  
"Your own Earth?" Kara asked.  
  
Helena fell silent for a minute, sipping from her coffee.  
  
"The Earth. There was but one left."  
  
Kara gasped, her fingers crushing her coffee cup without her even noticing. Just one Earth left? The Anti-Monitor had succeeded in destroying even more lives despite everything she had done?  
  
"W-which Earth?" she asked, almost afraid of the answer. Had her Earth survived? Was Kal still alive?  
  
"It was ... well, somehow the five Earths had ... they had been merged into one. This one Earth comprised elements of all five that existed previously."  
  
It was more than Kara could easily absorb. Five Earths had merged into some kind of amalgamation? What had changed? She knew that one on of the Earths, the one called Earth-X, the Nazis had won World War 2. Was this now also the case on this new Earth? What about the people that were duplicated across the various worlds, people like Kal?  
  
"It was a complete mess," Helena said, looking into her half-empty coffee cup. "Only those of us who had been at the dawn of time when it happened remembered that there had ever been multiple Earths. All the people, they ... they didn't know. To them this was the way it had always been." She gave a shaky laugh, her own poker face now showing cracks as well. "What am I saying? That was the way things had always been. The universe had been changed from the very beginning forward. There had never been an Earth-1 or -2 or -X or whatever. Just this one planet. Just this one that ..."  
  
Her voice trailed off and Kara could see a tear leaking from her eye.  
  
"What is it, Helena?" she asked softly, gently taking one of the other woman's hands in her own. For a moment the other woman just stared at their joint hands, looking as if she was about to withdraw, but then seemingly resigned herself.  
  
"It didn't have a place for us," she whispered. "My ... my father ... he never existed. The Earth-1 Batman became the Batman of this world. I never existed there."  
  
Kara's heart went out to Helena, but there was still one thing she needed to know, no matter how cruel it was to throw her own worries on the table in the face of the other woman's pain.  
  
"What about Kal? Superman?"  
  
Helena looked up, wiping the single tear in her eye away with an almost angry gesture. She visibly gathered herself, choking back the sob that had been building in her throat.  
  
"He was still there. He ... he had a place. It was my world's Superman who ... who was forgotten."  
  
Kara closed her eyes, at the same time incredibly thankful and ashamed. Thank Rao Kal had survived. What about the other Superman, though? Kara had met him a couple of times and, even though his powers were weaker than that of her cousin, he had exuded an air of nobility, strength, and wisdom that her cousin had been unable to match. Just like Kal he had been the first hero of his world, but he had fought to keep it safe for nearly fifty years, had been the role model for several generations.  
  
Now the world had forgotten him? Where was the fairness in that? She chided herself a moment later. By now she should know better than to expect life to be fair.  
  
"The Anti-Monitor attacked again, though," Helena went on a moment later, her composure regained. "He transported all of Earth to the anti-matter universe and sent an army of shadow demons to wipe out all life. We rallied to fight him off, all of us, even those who had been forgotten."  
  
She looked down and clenched her fists. "I don't know how this battle ended. I ... I was trying to save some children and a building collapsed on top of me. Dick ... the Robin of my world, he was there, trying to dig me out. Some of the shadows attacked us then. One of the Teen Titans tried to help us. Kole, I think her name was. But she couldn't fend them off. They swarmed upon us and ... that's pretty much it. Next thing I know we ... I was here."  
  
"We?" Kara asked, having noticed Helena's slip-up.  
  
"Dick," Helena said after a moment's hesitation. "He's here, too. We arrived together."  
  
Kara had never met the Robin of Earth-2, either, except for that big get- together due to the Crisis. She remembered him as an older man, late fifties or so, grey streaks in his hair. He had appeared quite fit and competent, though.  
  
Helena's slip-up caused her to confront her about the other matter.  
  
"Why did you want to keep that from me? You're still looking at me as if you're not sure whether I'm friend or enemy."  
  
The other woman hesitated, buying some seconds by draining her cup of coffee. Putting it aside she finally said, "you shouldn't be here."  
  
"I know that, Helena. Neither should you. We should both be at home and ..."  
  
"I don't mean it that way," Helena interrupted her. For a long moment she seemed to wrestle with herself, then reached a decision. "You shouldn't be here because you are dead."  
  
Kara paled. "What?"  
  
"You said the last thing you remember was fighting the Anti-Monitor. You said you thought he had killed you, that you were dying."  
  
"Yes, but obviously I was wrong because I woke up here and ..."  
  
"He did kill you. I ... I saw your body. Superman brought it back from the anti-matter universe. I was at your funeral."  
  
For a full minute Kara said nothing, simply stared at Helena, somehow hoping that the words she had just heard were an incredibly tasteless joke. Only they were not. She could see it in Helena's eyes even as her senses told her of the other woman's even pulse and breathing. It was true then, or as true as Helena knew it to be.  
  
Kara slumped in her seat, every bit of strength seeping out of her body. How could this be? She distinctly remembered the battle and then waking up here. How could she have died? Left a body behind? Yes, she had powers far beyond most other beings, be they from Earth or not, but returning from the dead was not one of them. How was this possible?  
  
It certainly explained Helena's weariness, the rational part of her mind told her through the maelstrom of emotions.  
  
"You think I'm a fake?" she finally asked Helena. "Some kind of ... I don't know, clone? Maybe something the Anti-Monitor cooked up?"  
  
"I am not sure what to think. I'm trapped on a strange world that shouldn't even exist, seeing as all parallel worlds were either destroyed or merged into one, and I find a woman whose funeral I attended. What would you think?"  
  
She nodded, too emotionally drained from everything she had just heard to do much more than that. Put like that she could hardly blame Helena for being a bit suspicious.  
  
She had died. Rao, Kal had brought back her body. How this must have hurt him. And what about the others? How many of the people she knew were still there in this strange merged world Helena told her about? What about those people who no longer had a place in that world? People like Helena and the Earth-2 Superman? What would happen to them now?  
  
"For what it's worth," Helena said after the two of them were silent for a long time, "I think you are who you say you are. I just don't know how it's possible."  
  
Kara managed a small smile.  
  
"Welcome to the club, Helena."  
  
TO BE CONTINUED 


	5. Ashes and Ruins

Author's Notes: I realise that my portrayal of Wonder Woman contains some elements of the modern version, even though this is supposed to be the Silver Age variant. While I adore the old Diana, I still think that the modern version's history makes a lot more sense, eliminating a lot of the Silver Age Amazons' sci-fi elements in favour of mythological ones. You might want to imagine that this Wonder Woman appearing here, though originally the Silver Age version, was already partly changed by the rewriting of history that took place on the post-Crisis Earth before she was 'devolved' by the Anti-Monitor and is therefor stuck somewhere between the original Silver Age and the modern version.  
  
#  
  
Part 5: Ashes and Ruins  
  
#  
  
Diana stood on the shores of the island, her body shaking with barely contained rage and a hundred other emotions, gazing at the scenery unfolding before her. Her eyes saw it, took it all in, but her rage-clouded mind refused to accept it. It was just impossible.  
  
Finding Paradise Island had not been easy, even with her knowledge of its exact location. She knew that, in her world, most people believed that the island was somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle, that near mythical stretch of ocean that seemed to swallow planes and ships almost regularly. It was a mistake that she saw no reason to correct. A lot of people had tried to find the island in the past, especially since Diana had revealed herself to man's world. The more of them searched in the wrong place the better.  
  
The truth was that Paradise Island did not really exist in man's world at all, not any longer anyway. It had been a mere Mediterranean island when the goddesses Athena and Aphrodite first led the Amazons there, but ever since then it had been separated from the rest of the world by a magical veil that only few were able to pierce.  
  
The only way for someone to reach the island by boat was to follow the exact same route that the ancient Amazons themselves had taken during their exodus to Paradise several thousand years ago, starting at the shores of Greece and heading directly into a seemingly empty spot in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. It was this route that Diana had followed and, after several attempts, it had led her to the shores of her home. Or this world's version of her home, anyway.  
  
She had beached the small boat on the same shore where she had pulled Steve Trevor out of the ocean so many years before, wading through the water until she reached dry land. Her steps had been uncertain, more of a stumbling than anything else, as her eyes were rooted to what lay before her, her mind spinning with disbelief.  
  
The island was a wasteland.  
  
Only a few hundred meters in front of her, the place where she remembered the first buildings to be, blackened ruins reached into the overcast sky like skeletal fingers. The ground, once lush and fertile, had been fused into glass. There was no trace of the towers and spires she remembered, the statues of their gods and goddesses. Only ruins.  
  
Even the omnipresent anger faded from her conscious mind as she made her way further in, stumbling through ashes and remains in a daze. The warrior inside herself immediately started analysing her surroundings in a military fashion. In several places there was nothing left but fused ground and bare rock, the devastation growing less farther away from these. Impact craters? Some kind of air strike? She could see no signs of actual fighting in the streets.  
  
She found corpses littering the remains of the city. Skeletons, nothing more than bones and some dried-up remains of skin and flesh. They had been dead for decades. Her entire body was shaking, but her warrior's mind still listed up the facts in a cold, clinical fashion. No armour on the bodies, no sign of weapons apart from those merely ceremonial. They had not known what was coming. They must have been taken by surprise.  
  
A sob broke free from her throat and Diana realised that her control was about to snap, maybe for good. The rage clouding her mind was meshing with the sadness and outrage caused by what she was seeing and the result would be something more terrible than the mythical Furies. With trembling hands she knelt down beside one of the bodies and, cursing herself for a grave robber all the while, removed the only thing from the corpse that had survived the devastation intact.  
  
The Amazonian bracelets.  
  
The moment she slipped the cool metal over her wrists she felt her mind clear. The boundless fury receded. Not too far, though, not far at all. It was still there, boiling beneath the surface, and Diana knew that it did not originate with the Amazonian curse, but with what she was seeing here. Someone or something had killed these people, killed them all. They had been taken by surprise, slaughtered like sheep by an invisible enemy, who had left their bodies to rot in the ruins of their beautiful island.  
  
Diana squeezed her eyes closed and fell to her knees, tears streaming down her face. Her hands reached towards the skies, pleading, demanding, as her voice called out across the dead city.  
  
"Gods of Olympus, hear your daughter's plea. Tell me who has desecrated this island home that you blessed my sisters with! Reveal to me who has murdered my sisters in this world!"  
  
She reached out with every sense she had, searching for that connection her people had always shared with their creators. During her life she had met all the gods of Olympus, had fought with and against many of them. Things she had seen during her adventures, both in space and here on Earth, had made it more than clear that they were not the omnipotent creators of all that was that they often pretended to be. Ares, the god of war, had found defeat at her own hands a few times too often for her to believe in divine supremacy. Yet never had she lost faith in the denizens of Mt. Olympus. Omnipotent or not, they had called the Amazons into existence, had given life to her form of clay, and that was more than enough to qualify them as gods in Diana's eyes.  
  
Only now she was reaching out to touch these very same gods and found nothing but silence.  
  
Diana knelt in the ashes for hours, searching for some sign, some clue that the gods who had called her sisters into being in this strange world had heard her words, that they might be listening and willing to help her. There was nothing, though. The silence around her was like a fist squeezing the life out of her.  
  
"Have you forsaken me?" she asked, wondering whether the gods did not hear her at all or were simply not in the mood to listen.  
  
She clenched her fists, trying to smother the rage she felt build inside herself again. Only days ago, or so it seemed to her, her Amazonian sisters and her had strode through the hallowed halls of Olympus itself, had fought beside the gods to repel the unholy alliance of Hades, Ares, and the Anti- Monitor. If not for them the gods themselves would have perished, yet here they refused to help her.  
  
Fool, she thought to herself. The gods that might or might not exist here in this world would have no more similarity to those she and her sisters had saved than this island had with her home. They would feel no obligation to help her. Maybe they were not even here any longer. Gods sustained themselves on faith and she doubted that many people outside Paradise Island had kept faith with the Greek pantheon. Maybe the death of this world's Amazons had been the deaths of their gods as well?  
  
All this went through the rational part of her mind, the conclusions and theories filed away for later consideration. The largest part of Diana was numb, though, unable to do anything but gaze at the ruins of what could have been her home. Someone had murdered her sisters here. Someone who had to be punished for this crime.  
  
One of the bodies she walked by had carried a sword at its hip. The blade was warped and blackened, of little use as a weapon, but she drew it nevertheless and ran the dull edge over her palm until she drew blood. Droplets of it fell to the ground, mingling with the ashes.  
  
"You will be avenged, my sisters. This I swear by my blood."  
  
#  
  
Kara was drifting motionless at the very edge of Earth's atmosphere, her blue eyes gazing at the world below her that so resembled her own, yet was so very different. To the satellites whose orbit she crossed she was little more than a piece of space debris, if they picked her up at all. She emitted no energy to trace, her body barely reflected radar beams, and who would look for an unprotected human body in space anyway? Certainly no one on this world, that much was for sure.  
  
She thought back a day to her first encounter with Helena and, later that same night, her step brother Richard Grayson. At the end of their talk Helena had been more or less convinced that she actually was who she said she was. The idea of someone she had seen die coming back to life wasn't really any stranger than five worlds merging into one, entire histories being rewritten, whole universes collapsing.  
  
In many ways Dick, as he called himself, reminded her of his doppelganger on Earth-1, whom she had first got to know when he had still been Batman's side-kick Robin. She had lost track of him over the years, but knew that he had handed over the costume to someone else, creating a new identity for himself. Nightwing, he called himself now, leader of the Teen Titans.  
  
Nothing of the sort had happened to this Richard Grayson. He had stopped being Robin when he went to college and by the time he came back his Batman had been married, expecting a daughter, and thinking about retirement. He had taken up the mantle of Robin once again, taking his mentor's place as protector of Gotham City and member of the Justice Society.  
  
From what the two had told Kara their father had never found out that Helena had become the Huntress. The world's greatest detective had been blind to what was going on inside his own family. Then he had died before they could tell him, leaving them behind to continue his crusade against crime.  
  
Dick, now rapidly approaching the age where further activity as a masked vigilante became a really bad idea, had opted for a more covert role during their stay in this new world. Helena had been restless, feeling helpless and betrayed by a universe that now denied her very existence. She had needed something to occupy herself and had found it by introducing this new Gotham City to the concept of vigilante justice. Dick, meanwhile, had taken it upon himself to find out all he could about this world and, hopefully, find a way home for them.  
  
Kara had not needed to actually hear them argue about that. Their looks had spoken volumes. What was the use, Helena's eyes seemed to say. There is no more place for us in that merged world that used to be home than in this new one. Why go back? It wasn't like anyone would miss them over there. Dick clearly did not see things that way. If no one else than the heroes who had fought with them at the dawn of time still remembered them.  
  
Her own thoughts were still churning, trying to work through the idea that everyone back home thought her dead. Kal had buried her. How was it possible that she had left a body behind? She was here, wasn't she? Body and all. Either someone had snatched her away mere moments before her death, leaving some kind of fake in her place for Kal and the others to find or ... she was not really sure what the alternative was. Some kind of soul voyage? Her restless spirit travelling to a new world? No, that idea was ridiculous. Where would this body come from then? There had to be a better explanation.  
  
She just had trouble thinking of one.  
  
Helena, Dick, and Kara had spent the last day going over their combined notes. Dick had found much the same she had. This world seemed to resemble Earth-1, a world Dick knew quite a bit about thanks to his stint in the Justice Society and their frequent visits, just without superheroes. He had also found some people he remembered existing exclusively on Earth-2, but none of those had been heroes back home, so it came as no surprise that they weren't here, either.  
  
He and Helena had also come to the same conclusions Kara had drawn. The idea that every single event that would have given superpowers or the motivation to become a superhero to the people they knew just happened to be missing in this world was a bit much too take. It was all just too neat. Three heroes who would not be missed back home, either because they were believed dead or had been forgotten, just happened to end up on a world were no one had ever become a superhero. Something stunk here.  
  
One new idea that their meeting had produced was that the three of them might not be the only ones stranded here. The Crisis had cut a bloody swath through the ranks of the heroes of five Earths and more. So many had died. Many more had found themselves without a home after the merging of the Earths. Were they here, too? If they were then they had to find them.  
  
Dick and Helena were busy milking the internet for all it was worth, trying to find people that had simply appeared out of thin air during the crimson storms. New identities that had been created since then. Kara had learned that Helena and Dick had also seen the need to be legally alive. To all but the most suspicious pair of eyes Richard Grayson and Helena Wayne (the latter in no way related to Gotham's famous son Bruce Wayne) had existed on this world ever since their mothers had given birth to them. Maybe others had done the same.  
  
Kara was doing the same thing, only without electronic aid. Her enhanced senses were able to sweep the globe in a matter of hours. Of course simply looking at everything was no guarantee that one would actually spot what one was searching for. More than once Kara had been forced to realise that her superior senses came with their own version of a blind spot. Sort of like not seeing the forest for the trees.  
  
She was looking for things that stood out. People performing superhuman feats. Familiar faces. Familiar places. Crowds in an uproar because of something that should not exist in this perfectly normal world.  
  
It took Kara several hours until she finally found something. Her eyes swept across the Mediterranean and came to rest on an island. A familiar island. Yes, she dimly remembered. She had been there before once, during a time when a large part of the superheroines on Earth had come together under the guidance of the woman who called this place home.  
  
Kara did not breathe this far up into space, but had she done so her breath would have caught in her throat as she beheld the devastation below her. The island was little more than a charred ruin, littered with bodies. Nothing moved there, not even animals or insects. Everything was gone.  
  
There was one body moving among the wreckage, though. A familiar body.  
  
Dropping out of orbit like a stone Kara fell back towards the planet below and the blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea. All the way down to Earth, all 5,000 kilometres of it, Kara cursed herself for an airhead. Paradise Island, how could she have forgotten looking there? It wasn't like Wonder Woman wasn't one of the pre-eminent superheroes on her world, was it? When people started talking about superheroes the same three names usually fell first: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.  
  
When Kara had first arrived on Earth she had looked up to Diana. Yes, Kal had been her mentor and role model when it came to being a superhero, but Diana had been her role model when it came to being a heroine. Most female superheroes had started out as sidekicks of other, male heroes. Batgirl, Hawkgirl, even herself. Wonder Woman was different. Not only was she one of the first superheroes altogether, she had shown a generation of female super beings how to do it.  
  
Even from her great height Kara had no problems making out the one living figure walking amidst the ruins of Paradise Island. Diana, no doubt about it. The question was, though, was it the Diana she knew? She didn't think it was the Diana of Earth-2, as she had been older, her immortality lost upon leaving her home to marry a mortal man. There was, of course, the possibility that this Diana was native here. Somehow Kara did not think so, though. The destruction of the island wasn't recent, years if not decades had passed since its demise. Why would the local Diana get around to inspecting it just now?  
  
Kara bridged the distance in the time it took to formulate these thoughts and set down on an island no man had walked on in thousands of years. Something about a curse, she recalled, one that would spell doom for the amazons if a man should ever set foot on their home. Was that what had happened here? No, she did not really think so. This place looked like it had been bombed from the air and she rather doubted that magical curses manifested as air-to-ground missiles.  
  
No, it was far more probable that someone had found the Amazons, someone who did not like to have a race of technologically advanced females that were invisible to the world at large. So he or they had destroyed them. Just like that.  
  
Diana was kneeling in the ashes only a few feet away from her, but seemed unaware of Kara's presence. She approached slowly, hesitant to disturb the other woman in her obvious grief. Her first step caused a few charred bones to shift.  
  
The noise caused Wonder Woman to spring into action, moving with a speed that even Kara found hard to follow. The Amazon's eyes were cauldrons of red-hot fury and before she could even utter a word Diana lashed out at her. The blow caught her directly on the chin.  
  
Kara flew through the air, feeling as if she had been hit by a freight train. She hit the ground hard, more than a hundred meters away from where she had been just a moment earlier, and every bone in her body hurt. Especially her chin, which she was sure was going to be bruised tomorrow.  
  
"Ouch," she muttered.  
  
The differences in strength between a fully powered Kryptonian and Wonder Woman were hard to measure. When applied to third-party objects there was not even a contest. Diana could lift tanks. Kal and Kara could throw moons around. The Amazon wasn't even in their league. For some reason, though, that vast difference in strength did not translate well into actual one-on- one combat. Kal and Diana had come to blows a few times, sometimes in training, sometime due to manipulation by a villain or other, and it had always been close. Kal had suspected it was due to Wonder Woman's powers being magic-based. Kryptonians did not handle magic well.  
  
Kara cleared the cobwebs, slowly climbing back to her feet. That blow certainly should not have hurt as much as it did, yet it had. Which meant that she did not want to continue this slugfest any longer than necessary, and not just because she did not want to hurt Diana. Said person was stalking toward her even now with fire in her eyes.  
  
"Diana, it's me," Kara pleaded, taking a few steps back. "Supergirl! Don't you remember me?"  
  
For a moment Diana seemed to hesitate, but only for a moment. The rage clouding her face scared Kara to the bone.  
  
"I don't know who you are," the Amazon said through clenched teeth, "but you made a grave mistake assuming this guise. Supergirl is dead, I was there. You have five seconds to tell me if you had anything to do with what happened to my sisters before I tear you apart."  
  
TO BE CONTINUED 


	6. Reunions

Part 6: Reunions  
  
#  
  
Kara, her jaw aching from a punch that would have pulverised brick, was inching back from an enraged Amazon who was perfectly able and more than willing to deliver more of the same.  
  
"Diana, it's me! Supergirl! Don't you remember me?"  
  
Her words didn't sway the furious woman.  
  
"I don't know who you are, but you made a grave mistake assuming this guise. Supergirl is dead, I was there. You have five seconds to tell me if you had anything to do with what happened to my sisters before I tear you apart."  
  
"Diana ..."  
  
"One," Wonder Woman said, slugging her again. Kara was braced for the blow this time, but it still set her back several steps, her heels digging deep into the scorched ground. A strange taste entered her mouth and she was astonished to find that her lip had split. She was bleeding. This hadn't happened in quite a while.  
  
"Two!" Diana aimed another blow at her, but Kara was getting tired of playing the punching back. She evaded the punch with super speed and zipped behind Diana, capturing the other in a full nelson.  
  
"Listen to me," she yelled at Diana. "It's really me, Kara! I don't know how that is possible, but it's me! I ..."  
  
Wonder Woman threw her over her shoulder in mid-sentence, causing Kara to land on her rear end. Moments later the Amazon's arms were around her throat, squeezing with a strength that could easily bend steel.  
  
"Who are you?"  
  
Kara gasped for air, taken unprepared. She had heard stories saying that Kryptonians did not need air to breathe. That was nonsense, of course. Every living being needed to breathe, whether it was oxygen, methane, or something else. Kryptonians were able to so completely oxygenate their blood that they could sustain on it for hours, even days, but only if they managed to take at least several deep breaths beforehand. Taken unprepared Kara was as susceptible to strangulation as the next woman.  
  
"I ... am ... Supergirl," she managed to choke out. "You ... you gave ... Kal ... a replica of ... Kandor for his ... birthday. The two ... of you once ... played at ... being in love ... in order to ... fool a supervillain into ... attacking you ... instead of Lois."  
  
The stranglehold around her neck lessened almost imperceptibly, allowing Kara to draw in some air.  
  
"You gathered a cadre of female super beings to fight against the Judge," she quickly continued, sensing that she had made some headway. "I once joined the Justice League for a single case when Superman was missing in space and we went out to find him."  
  
Wonder Woman let go and Kara hungrily drew in the air, making sure to pump enough oxygen to last for a while, just in case Diana was not completely convinced yet. She slowly turned to look at the other woman.  
  
Diana's face was still filled with rage and sadness, but it no longer seemed to be directed towards her.  
  
"Kara?" Diana asked, disbelief in her voice. "Great Hera, how is this possible?"  
  
A small smile graced Kara's lips. "I know some people who were fashioned out of clay. I know a man who died forty years ago and still walks the Earth. If there is one thing people like us should know by now it's that nothing is impossible."  
  
Diana just stared at her for a long moment, then caught her in an embrace that was almost as crushing as her earlier chokehold. Kara could feel her body shaking with a hundred emotions and she carefully hugged her back, her own feelings almost as strong. Seeing Helena and Dick had been great, a sign that she was not a complete stranger in this world, but Diana was different. She was from her own world. They had worked together, were something close to friends.  
  
In the ashes and ruins of Paradise Island these two women clung to each other, eternally thankful for having found each other.  
  
Neither of them was sure how much time had passed when they finally let go again. Diana's face was not the mask of fury it had been earlier, but Kara could clearly see the rage simmering beneath the deceptively calm surface. Diana had always been a mass of contradictions for her. An ambassador of peace from an island of warrior women, a tender and loving person yet the fiercest warrior she had ever met.  
  
Right now she could see very little of said tenderness and Kara was certain that peace was the last thing on Diana's mind.  
  
"Can you do me a favour, Kara?" Diana asked.  
  
"Of course."  
  
"Find out what happened here!"  
  
Kara nodded. Diana knew of the superior senses Kryptonians possessed, of course, and there was a good chance that Kara would be able to figure out how the island had been destroyed simply by looking at the wreckage.  
  
She started by checking out the glassed-over ground, the most likely point of impact for whatever weapon had done this. She narrowed her eyes until she could see right down to the microscopic level. There were leftover traces of radiation in the ground, a type she was not familiar with. Judging by the level of decay, though, she was able to give an estimate as to how long ago this weapon, whatever it was, had struck here.  
  
"It happened about fifteen to eighteen years ago," Kara said out loud. "I can see no debris from bomb casings or such, so it probably was some kind of beam weapon."  
  
Rising into the air, Kara looked across a vaster area of devastation and, trying to shut down her emotions, coldly calculated angles and patterns.  
  
"The beams must have struck almost vertically," she told Diana. "My best guess is some kind of aircraft. Maybe even an orbital installation. I doubt the Amazons saw it coming."  
  
"Paradise Island is surrounded by a magical veil that prevents detection," Diana said, her voice almost completely neutral. "Assuming that my sisters on this world had something similar, how did these weapons find them?"  
  
"I've yet to see a computer that can match wits with magic," Kara answered. "Whoever did this either found a way to penetrate the veil or the Amazons opened it for some reason."  
  
Diana frowned for a moment, then seemed to have an idea. One that was not to her liking at all.  
  
"The veil on our world was only ever opened for one reason," she said gravely. "When I left or returned to the island."  
  
Kara hesitated for a moment, then got the idea. She swept her gaze wide, searching the surroundings of the island. Finally she found what she had been looking for. Moving in a blur she dove into the ocean about half a mile off the island and returned barely a minute later, dragging a large piece of wreckage behind her. An almost invisible piece of wreckage.  
  
"The Invisible Jet," Diana said, inspecting the debris. "Or what's left of it."  
  
Diana's strange aircraft had been all but undetectable even to Kryptonian eyes, it's unique construction incorporating as much magic as it did technology. Yet, just like with the island itself, someone had apparently managed to see it just fine. Fifteen years under the ocean had barely scratched the material, leaving the ragged edge where an energy beam had sheared it in half quite visible.  
  
"It's the same radiation signature as in the ground," Kara said. "They must have shot it down."  
  
The pilot compartment was empty and Kara was quite thankful for that. The cockpit was cracked open and partially scorched, leaving little doubt regarding the pilot's fate. Unlike the plane a human body, even one magically fashioned out of clay, would not survive fifteen years underwater.  
  
Kara's microscopic vision found some organic residue, almost completely eaten away by algae and sea life. From what she could see the DNA was a nearly perfect match for Diana.  
  
#  
  
Some hours later Diana and Kara had arrived at the apartment in Gotham City that Helena and Dick had rented. Kara had no idea where they got the money from, seeing as neither of them seemed to have taken over a day job like she had back in Metropolis, but right now she did not much care. Diana was much more familiar with the two heroes from Earth-2, having worked with them on numerous cases during her time in the Justice League.  
  
"It's good to see you, Wonder Woman," Helena said. It was good, too. Even though Helena was more familiar with another, older version of the amazing amazon, just seeing her face was doing wonders.  
  
"Helena," Diana answered with a smile that did not quite reach her eyes. "Richard. I am glad to see that you are alive. We all thought you dead when the shadow demons invaded the Earth."  
  
"It seems a lot of that is going around," Kara interjected. "Someone snatched me away moments before I died. Someone took Dick and Helena before the shadow demons could kill them. Diana, you said the Anti-Monitor blasted you just before you woke up here."  
  
"Yes, that is correct."  
  
"Whoever or whatever did this to us seemed to have taken us all just before we should have perished." Dick sat down in front of the computer he had somehow acquired. "If that is the case, then there could be others here. Quite a few of us died, or seemed to die, during the Crisis."  
  
"If nothing else it speaks of an awful lot of power. We were all snatched from different places. The Anti-Monitor's fortress, the merged Earth, Alexander Luthor's portal. Not to mention what it would take to heal Kara's wounds and provide whatever medical aid the rest of us might have needed. All while transporting us across dimensional barriers to a world so distant from our own that the Anti-Monitor missed it somehow."  
  
Kara noticed that Diana barely seemed to listen to Dick and Helena's words. From the times she had worked together she remembered that Wonder Woman had always been the type to take charge of any given situation. Her passivity, as well as the rage she still saw in her eyes, worried her more right now than whoever might have stranded them all in this world.  
  
"Diana?" she asked softly, laying her hand on the Amazon's shoulder. "You all right?"  
  
"I am about as far from all right as I can be."  
  
Dick and Helena looked up from their discussion, now also catching the murderous look in Diana's eyes.  
  
"Whatever has taken us here," Diana said when all eyes were upon her, "could obviously have killed us. Or left us for dead. Instead it brought us here. To a world where all the people we know to be heroes have somehow been prevented from becoming what they should have been. I don't believe in coincidence and I don't believe it was chance or natural disaster that wiped out my sisters on this world."  
  
Kara did not know what to say. She had never heard such steel in Diana's voice.  
  
"This is a world without heroes. Without protectors. A world where someone or something has murdered an entire people and got away with it. Who knows what else was done with no one here to prevent it. What other crimes were committed without anyone noticing."  
  
"What are you saying, Diana?" Helena asked.  
  
"I am saying, Helena, that this world needs heroes. It needs someone to right its wrongs. However it happened, we are here. And while we are here we have a duty. I intend to fulfil it. I intend to find the murderer of my sisters. And I intend to set things right."  
  
TO BE CONTINUED 


	7. Out in the Open

Part 7: Out in the Open  
  
#  
  
"Thank you congressman," Kara said with a smile. "This was a most enlightening interview."  
  
Hal Jordan gave her a smile of his own, one that had broken the hearts of quite a few women over the years. He was no longer a test pilot, of course, that dangerous business was a young man's game. Somehow he had retained the air of a dashing daredevil, though, and his eyes sparkled with a sort of smug charm.  
  
For all his friendliness and charm, though, the interview had not availed Kara much. Well, it would enable her to write Karen Kell's next article and keep the money coming in, but that was all. This Hal Jordan had never encountered a dying alien named Abin Sur. He had never been given a ring of power that could turn thoughts into reality. And the mention of one Barry Allen, his best friend in another world, had not produced so much as a spark of recognition in his eyes.  
  
"It's always a pleasure dealing with the press," Hal said as he shook her hand. "Especially if they are as lovely as you are, Ms. Kell."  
  
They exchanged a few more pleasantries before Kara managed to slip out of his office, walking out into the pristine air of Washington DC. With a defeated huff she sat down on the steps of the congress building and looked out across the sights, yet her thoughts were busy elsewhere.  
  
She knew that all the others were busy as well, investigating those people they remembered as their friends, trying to find some common element that might have prevented them from becoming heroes. Maybe the same something or someone that had destroyed Paradise Island. They were also looking for other occurrences they knew should have taken place. Things like a rocket carrying the last son of Krypton to Earth.  
  
Again and again Kara found her thoughts drifting off towards her cousin. He thought her dead. He had buried her body. God, how lonely he must feel now, she thought. Yes, there were other survivors of Krypton out there, but Kal and her had been the only ones living on Earth, the only ones within reach. Family to each other, the only true family they knew.  
  
Shaking her head, she brought her thoughts back on track. She just hoped the others were having a bit more luck than she. Hal had known exactly zip about aliens, even though she had managed to steer their conversation in that direction a bit when she asked him whether he had ever seen any UFOs during his test pilot days. He had simply laughed and disregarded the notion as ridiculous. Had he lied to her she would have known, so this was a dead end.  
  
Diana was in Central City, she knew, arranging for a chance meeting with one Barry Allen. Dick was impersonating a law professor applying for a position at Midvale University, hoping to have one Ray Palmer show him around the campus. Helena was looking into the background of the man who should have been her father some more, hoping to find some clues as to why this world's Bruce Wayne had not gone vigilante after his parents' death.  
  
Looking out across the city with eyes that could count the grains of sand on Mars Kara found nothing that could be of any help to her. While some of the gloom that had descended upon her after her arrival had lifted due to the presence of the others, she still found little to smile about in this strange new world. And it wasn't just the seeming hopelessness of their situation or the question of whether or not their homeworld, any version of it, still existed somewhere out there.  
  
It was something about this world, Kara concluded. Somehow it seemed so much harsher than her own, so much more brutal. There were no villains in flashy costumes here. No one broke open bank vaults with super-strength or freeze rays. All the crimes she could observe here seemed so much more mundane and yet often ten times as brutal.  
  
This world seemed like a dark reflection of her own. All the evil that, in her world, appeared in the guise of bald evil scientists, purple aliens, or laughing clowns, was spread out amongst the normal people here. Terrorist attacks, wars, religious conflict, all these seemed so much more intense here than back home. So much more violent, so much more real. Could it be that they had simply never noticed due to their preoccupation with the costumed criminals and invading aliens? The thought disturbed her somehow.  
  
Kara was so preoccupied with her gloomy thoughts that she almost didn't notice the screeching sound in the air until it became audible to merely human ears. She looked up, confused, and her superior eyes immediately zoomed in on a large shape descending towards the city of Washington at frightening speed.  
  
An airplane, she realized a moment later. An airplane with one burning engine and quite obviously out of control. Within less than a second she calculated its angle of descent. It would crash right into the middle of the city. Hundreds if not thousands of lives would be lost unless she did something and fast.  
  
Kara reacted purely out of instinct, not spending so much as a heartbeat thinking about what she was about to do. She simply took off, shedding the coat she had worn, revealing the shirt with the S-symbol she wore beneath. A sonic boom travelled in her wake as she bridged the distance to the doomed plane in less than a second.  
  
Even as she hurtled towards it her senses picked up on several other things. The plane was being painted by targeting systems. Of course, this was Washington. The White House was down there, the Congress, the Supreme Court. Even before September 11, something she had read about at length, the skies above this city would have been carefully watched. Now, with terrorist paranoia still running high, it would be a matter of seconds until some overzealous military man gave the order to shoot the plane down rather than risk it crashing into the city.  
  
All of which meant she had even less time than she had thought.  
  
It was not the first time she had had to catch an object this size. She knew all the problems it entailed. It wasn't simply a matter of strength, something she had in abundance. There was no way she could simply catch and stop such a large and fast-moving object without it going to pieces on her. She had to stabilize it, level it out, and be careful not to apply too much of her strength to the fragile metal hull.  
  
She quickly zipped right towards the burning engine. A gust of super-breath took all the oxygen away from the fire, extinguishing it quickly. The engine was quite thoroughly ruined, though, so she quickly tore its remains free of the wing, careful to drop the pieces where they wouldn't do any harm. A moment later she moved herself into its place, replacing its thrust with her own power of flight even as her senses continued listening to the targeting lasers trained on the plane.  
  
No surface to air missiles came streaking her way, though, and slowly the plane began to come out of its descent, the pilot regaining control of his craft. They cleared the buildings with plenty of room to spare and headed directly towards the airport, where emergency vehicles were already scrambling out into the runway.  
  
Kara saw several people, crew and passengers both, peering out of the windows of the plane. They were looking at her with wide eyes. She gave them a jaunty wave.  
  
Only then did she realize what she had just done.  
  
For a moment she had forgotten where she was. In her world there was nothing unusual about flying people stepping in to prevent (or cause) catastrophes. Granted, airplanes weren't caught in mid-tumble every day, but it happened. Her cousin was a well-known sight in the skies above Metropolis and other cities. Him or some other hero catching a plane wouldn't be worth a front page even.  
  
But she wasn't in her world here. She was in a world that had never before seen a flying person before. A world where the mere idea of someone flying up and catching a crashing plane was so ludicrous as to be banished into the pages of comic books.  
  
Even as her thoughts were racing to find a way out of this new dilemma her body went through the motions. The plane set down on the tarmac of the airport and fire trucks, ambulances, and a dozen other vehicles came screeching towards it with barely any room to spare. Kara didn't linger. Some people had seen her, yes, but if she just moved fast enough there wouldn't be any concrete proof of her ever having been here. Maybe the ramblings of the passengers and crew would be dismissed as some kind of mass hysteria.  
  
The moment the plane was safely on the ground she zipped away at super speed, moving too fast for anyone to see or follow her. She picked up her coat and bag in front of the congress building without even slowing down and was racing beyond the city limit a heartbeat later.  
  
Every kilometre back to Gotham City, the place where their small group stayed for now, was spent berating herself. How could she be so stupid? There must have been another way to save that plane without giving her existence away as blatantly as that. Maybe she could have extinguished the fire from a distance, stabilized the plane with well-applied gusts of super- breath that no one would have been able to differentiate from normal wind. But no, she had to go right in there and let herself be seen by everyone on board that plane.  
  
Within minutes she reached the large apartment Richard had organized for them. She still hadn't asked where he had acquired the money for it all and didn't intend to. No one was currently there. All the others were still busy with their own assignments and none of them could return home as fast as she could, not even Diana.  
  
She dropped down onto the couch, sighing deeply. Maybe she was concerned about nothing. In a world where superbeings were considered nothing but comic book material she doubted anyone would take the words of the shocked passengers seriously. The pilot would only be too happy to claim sole credit for saving the plane. She had left too fast to be seen by anyone on the ground. Everything would be okay. Nothing but a funny urban myth would come from this. They were perfectly safe.  
  
Kara absentmindedly reached for the TV remote and flipped through the channels, needing something to distract her right now.  
  
Her fingers froze as she ended up on CNN.  
  
"These astonishing pictures are just coming in from one of our news crews at Washington airport," the announcer said. "It appears that the Delta Airlines flight 7431, coming in from New York, was saved from a potentially fatal engine failure by what appears to be ... a flying woman."  
  
Kara could only look on in shock as the disbelieving voice of the announcer accompanied a short video sequence that clearly showed her supporting the damaged airplane's wing as it came in for a landing.  
  
TO BE CONTINUED 


	8. Familiar Stranger

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Sorry I haven't updated this story in so long, I've been busy with other things. For one thing my first original novel is now out and available for purchase (check out www.shadow-dancing.com for details on that) and there is also that hindering thing called work.  
  
Anyway, in this part I'll finally give the first hints as to where our heroes actually ended up and who the bad guys are. Just to narrow it down a little, all characters are still owned by DC, but not all of them are necessarily part of the DC mainstream universe.  
  
Enjoy!  
  
####  
  
Part 8: Familiar Stranger  
  
#  
  
"This could be interesting," the man in front of the TV said, scratching his chin, which was covered with beard stubble. A moment later he got annoyed with it. A short burst of concentration sufficed to make flames burst forth from his finger, which he moved across his cheeks like a razorblade to burn off the stubble. His skin remained untouched.  
  
His eyes never left the screen, which showed the flying woman.  
  
A moment later a slight buzzing noise drew his attention and he removed a small device he carried on his belt. It looked almost like a cell phone, but when he activated it a small hologram sprang into being in front of him, showing the face of an older man.  
  
"I assume you saw."  
  
"Must be that genius level intellect of yours at work, Randall. It's only all over TV." He paused for a moment, looking at the screen again. "How do we want to handle this?"  
  
A small smile graced the older man's face. "Unsurprisingly Jacob voted for immediate sanction."  
  
"That isn't the worst idea I ever heard, you know? Not everyone can catch an airplane and carry it safely to the ground. Whoever this woman is, she must be quite powerful."  
  
"Indeed. Which is why Kim and I agree that a direct confrontation should be carefully prepared. Odds are this is connected to that interdimensional disturbance we picked up some months ago. The vibration patterns involved correspond with..."  
  
"Please spare me the techno babble. You have a plan, I'm sure."  
  
The hologram chuckled. "William, have you ever known me to be without a plan?"  
  
"Oh, I don't know. I think that little incident on the Luna trajectory came as something of a surprise to you, didn't it?"  
  
"Granted. Anyway, a few hours before this remarkable woman made her appearance one of our people informed me about something else. Someone else, rather. Someone who doesn't belong here, either. I believe, William, we might be able to kill two birds with one stone here."  
  
A grin grew on William's face as he listened to the plan his colleague had come up with. It promised to be very interesting.  
  
#  
  
"Maybe this doesn't have to be a complete disaster," Dick muttered, more to himself than to any of the three women currently in the room with him. Ever since the news broadcast Kara had been depressed, Helena restless, and Diana ... well, he still didn't quite know what to make of Diana. She had changed a lot from the woman he had known from his numerous adventures with Earth-1's Justice League. Seeing all her sisters murdered, or their doppelgangers from this world rather, had instilled her with a simmering rage he found himself quite weary of.  
  
"What do you mean?" Kara asked, looking up at him. She could certainly use a little silver lining right now.  
  
"If our theories about this world are correct," Dick elaborated, "if there is really someone or something here that has, for whatever reason, actively prevented super beings from coming into existence ..."  
  
"Then we have just given them their worst nightmare," Helena finished, catching on to his thoughts. "A fully-powered super being, right there on national TV. Out in the open for everyone to see."  
  
Kara nodded, understanding. "It might just provoke them into doing something stupid. Something that will lead us to them."  
  
"Or it might lead them to do something drastic," Diana countered. "They destroyed an entire island with thousands of people on it to prevent this world's version of me from going out into the light of the public. Who is to say they won't do something similar or worse now?"  
  
Diana was clenching and unclenching her fists as she spoke, something that didn't exactly calm Dick down.  
  
"They would have to be extremely stupid for that, Diana. The genie is out of the bottle; by now the entire world has seen these pictures. What are they going to do? Kill everyone?"  
  
Uncomfortable silence reigned for a moment as they all considered that question. It wasn't as rhetoric as Dick had meant it to be.  
  
"If we assume that we are dealing with a somewhat intelligent foe," he continued, hoping to dispel the grim mood he had just brought upon them, "then the only logical thing to do for him or them is to make sure that you," he pointed at Kara, "are never seen again. If there are no repeat performances then the whole thing will soon be written off as some kind of curiosity. People forget quickly."  
  
"Meaning they'll have to find and kill me," Kara concluded, rising to her feet with a look of anger on her face. "Let them try."  
  
"Don't throw caution to the wind, Kara," Helena interjected. "What- or whoever has manipulated this world, we can safely assume that they are quite powerful. You're tough, but you're not unbeatable."  
  
Kara managed to restrain the urge to put her fist through the wall. She was so tired of just sitting around on this strange world. Here she was, one of the most powerful superbeings ever, and all she could do was interview people who should be her friends yet didn't even know her and sit around on her behind.  
  
She looked over at Diana and knew that the other woman more than shared her feelings. They had to do something or they would go mad from all this uncertainty and inactivity.  
  
"Our best bet is to lure our enemy out," Dick proposed. "If we assume they'll be looking for Kara, maybe we can drop a few hints as to her whereabouts and hope that they'll come knocking on our ..."  
  
He was cut off by a knock on the door.  
  
For a long moment everyone froze, looking at the door, then exchanged some quick glances full of anxiety.  
  
"No way," Helena said.  
  
"Don't get spooked, people! It's just a coincidence." Dick didn't add the 'I hope' that was quite loud in his thoughts.  
  
Diana didn't say anything, but her body language changed as she readied herself for a fight. Kara needed a moment to overcome her confusion, then did what she should have done the moment the knock sounded. She squinted her eyes and activated her x-ray vision.  
  
Contrary to popular belief she couldn't simply look through walls as if there were big holes in them. Her eyes simply switched spectra until she saw in the Roentgen range, the world around her turning into a tapestry composed of the same little x-ray pictures doctors looked at every day.  
  
The door turned transparent to her eyes and she spotted the person standing behind it. She couldn't see his face, of course, but it was quite obviously a man, a human man, and he was alone. He carried a briefcase with some kind of electronic equipment inside and a gun in what she assumed was a shoulder holster, but apart from that there was nothing extraordinary about him.  
  
Kara quickly relayed the information to the others.  
  
"Dick, Helena," Diana quickly ordered, "stay behind Kara and me! Just in case he gets the idea of using that gun of his."  
  
The two non-powered heroes seemed a bit reluctant to take a step back, but quickly saw the wisdom of letting the two powerhouses among them take the brunt of whatever initial attack might be coming their way.  
  
Kara and Diana shared one final glance, then Kara quickly stepped forward and opened the door.  
  
Seeing the face of the man on the other side of the door caused her to freeze all over again.  
  
"May I come in?" Bruce Wayne asked her with the barest hint of a smile on his lips. "I believe we have quite a lot to talk about."  
  
TO BE CONTINUED 


	9. The World's Greatest Superheroes?

Part 9: The Worlds' Greatest Superheroes?  
  
#  
  
"It all began with the rockets," Bruce Wayne said, looking at the four people sitting in front of him with the air of a scholar. "1945. The war was over and the allies brought in Werner von Braun and his men of the Mittelwerk, the rocket builders. Their signature brand of German engineering would in time birth the Apollo program and bring American astronauts to the moon.  
  
"That's the part you can read in the history books. What's not in there are the other people brought over to the States by the Allies. The engineers and analysts Hitler secretly kept close to him in Berlin. No one knew their names or even what they were doing. They were at the highest level of Nazi security. These were the people who were going to put German astronauts on the moon in 1955 and aim space arks at Mars by '68.  
  
"These people were geniuses, decades ahead of their time, outshining von Braun and his peers. And by 1945 they were in the States, working on space travel."  
  
Helena looked at the man who was, for all intents and purposes, her father and managed to keep her face completely neutral.  
  
"What has any of this got to do with us?"  
  
He smiled, a smile that seemed to speak volumes and sent a shiver down Helena's spine. Her father never used to smile like that. He had been a hard man, his war on crime and the death of her mother had made him so, but the smile of this world's version of Bruce Wayne spoke of a man whom she didn't want to have at her back.  
  
"Patience, my dear. I promised I would tell you how this world came to be as it is and I will. Some back story is necessary for that, though."  
  
Kara watched this stranger with the familiar face and her thoughts drifted back half an hour, the time when he had first appeared on their doorstep. His appearance alone had been a shock, but it had only gotten worse when, after his initial introduction, he had come straight to the point of his visit:  
  
"I know you're not from around here," he had said. "I know you're from what you call a parallel world, one where history took a different turn. I also know that you've been trying to figure out what went wrong in this world, why there are no people like you around." He had looked at Diana. "Why your people were slaughtered here."  
  
Diana had looked at him with murder in her eyes, her fingers flexing with enough strength to grind solid rock into pebbles.  
  
"What do you know about my sisters' death, Mr. Wayne?"  
  
He had smiled that smile then, too. "I know who did it. Would you like to know?"  
  
The electronic equipment he had brought in his briefcase had turned out to be a laptop computer and right now he was using it to show them several different images to go along with his lecture. Kara kept her superior senses trained on his heartbeat all the time, listening for any signs that he was lying to them.  
  
There were none. So far, anyway.  
  
"It took JFK," he continued, "and a hideous amount of money to bring Apollo into orbit. This was only the surface, though. Apollo served as the show, the cold war glamour, our brave boys working their best to stay ahead of the evil Communists who effortlessly hurled those Sputniks into space and threatened the safety of the free world.  
  
"The real team, the secret team, worked under the call sign Artemis. They had a model comparable to the Saturn V booster ready to go by 1959 and used it to send the first men towards the moon by 1961. That was the work, the direct cold war, striking the kind of victories only the Russians and our government would ever know about.  
  
"The front line was being pushed farther and farther outward and the kind of finances pumped into this project are beyond anything and everything you could ever dream of. The crew for this mission was handpicked at levels far above that of the President or any other elected official. They were the best of the best, heroes, warrior kings. Arrogant, righteous, and looking to strike a blow for the American way of life.  
  
"On June 6, 1961 Artemis-Lunar launched with a crew of four. They never made it to the moon."  
  
Bruce paused, clicking on his laptop to bring up the picture of a man with grey temples and a severe look on his face.  
  
"The crew: Randall Dowling, physicist, engineer, you name it, he can do it. His list of disciplines is longer than my arm and he was rated with the highest IQ ever recorded on Earth. He was the project leader and flight commander."  
  
The next picture showed a man of roughly the same age, muscled and stoic looking.  
  
"Jacob Greene, the pilot. He flew missions during WW2 that no one ever learned about. Considered the greatest pilot of his generation. They said there wasn't a flying vehicle he couldn't learn to handle in a matter of minutes."  
  
Another man, younger, almost an archetype for the blonde, blue-eyed American hunk.  
  
"William Leather, flight engineer. He has some sort of history with exotic airplane design and there was a woman in Florida who swore to her dying day that she and Leather were the last people to ride aboard the Nautilus in 1959, but I'm rather sure that one is just a rumour."  
  
The final picture showed a woman, also blonde, with Nordic features and not a smile to be found anywhere on her face.  
  
"Kim Süskind was the daughter of one of the Nazi brain trust. A renowned geneticist in her own right, her job was to serve as medical officer and to study the effects space travel might have on the human physique."  
  
He clicked on the laptop again and it showed a picture of a rocket taking off.  
  
"The launch went ahead as scheduled. Everything worked just fine. Then something happened. No one could tell exactly what it was. I have read some transcripts from the final minutes of communication before radio contact with Artemis-L was lost. Whatever it was, the crew was every bit as surprised as the people on the ground.  
  
"For five days Artemis-L vanished from all screens. Then it returned to Earth. It seems like it whipped around the moon, much like the Apollo 13 escape trajectory. The capsule was fished out of the ocean and all four crewmembers were accounted for.  
  
"Only the Four weren't human anymore."  
  
He snapped the laptop shut.  
  
"Things get hazy after that. By 1964 Artemis officially didn't exist anymore and neither did the Four. The reason is that, by that year, they were running Artemis. They'd taken over the entire operation and were using its gigantic cash flow for their own agenda.  
  
"We know of but a few incidents since then where they were definitely involved." He turned to look at Kara. "In 1967 a UFO crash-landed near Smallville, Kansas. The Four got there first. By the time government agencies arrived there was nothing there, not even a sign of the impact crater. Nothing."  
  
He wasn't lying. His heartbeat was steady and even. Kara's was anything but. A rocket? In 1967? Smallville, Kansas? Kal? Rao, if there was even the slightest possibility he might be alive in this world ...  
  
"A year later they nuked a hidden city somewhere in Turkey," Bruce continued. "There were rumours that the people living there were a separate branch of humanity, one hereditarily gifted with magical powers. There were no survivors."  
  
Diana gritted her teeth. A hidden city with magically-enabled inhabitants? She had a pretty good idea who they might have been and, if she was right, her friend and fellow Justice Leaguer Zatanna had never been born on this world.  
  
"In 1985," Bruce now looked at Diana, "the Four, apparently through use of some magical artefacts they had acquired, found a hidden civilization in the Mediterranean. What little they learned of it spoke of advanced technology and a philosophy of peace and cooperation that went contrary to their own design. They had orbital cannons trained on the island's location and, the moment the mystical barrier keeping it hidden opened, they annihilated it."  
  
Diana rose to her feet, her entire body shaking with fury. Kara rose as well, not sure what her friend would do in a fit of rage. After everything Diana had been through she began to fear for her sanity.  
  
"Mr. Wayne," Diana began. "You have come here, possessing knowledge about us, and give us this story of a group of conspirators who have murdered my sisters and done Hera alone knows what to this world. How do you know all this? Why should we believe you?"  
  
Her body language screamed that, if she didn't like his answers, she would beat him into a bloody pulp.  
  
"I am willing to answer your questions, Ms. ... Wonder Woman, I believe? I will answer your questions, but not here. You must understand, all of you, that the Four have a chokehold on this world. For the last forty years they have done everything in their power to ensure that no force strong enough to challenge them could arise. Everyone and everything that could possibly be a threat to them has been destroyed quickly and unmercifully.  
  
"The only reason I am here today is because I'm careful. I was reluctant to bring an unknown quantity such as yourself in on our side, but a ... friend ... convinced me that you could be of tremendous help and would consider it your duty to bring down these people."  
  
"Who is your friend?" Kara asked. "How does he or she know us?"  
  
"Again, not here! The Four will be looking for you, ... Supergirl, correct? Our media has already begun calling you Angel after your little escapade with the airplane. You can be sure the Four have also seen it and are currently busy using every single resource at their disposal to locate you. Every second we stay here, in the open, is a tremendous risk."  
  
The four misplaced heroes shared a brief look.  
  
"Give us a moment, Mr. Wayne?" Dick finally said, nodding toward the exit.  
  
"Fine. I'll wait for two minutes and then I'm gone. Make your choice quickly!"  
  
Once he had left Kara was the first to speak. "He wasn't lying, at least not that I could tell. It's either true or he's the best liar I've ever encountered."  
  
"If it is true," Helena continued, "then we might be the only people on this Earth with a chance of taking on these 'Four' he was talking about."  
  
Diana was still bristling, but a dangerous calm had entered her eyes. Like a predator who had finally caught a whiff of its prey and knew it was just a matter of time now.  
  
"I say we follow him for now. Even if it is some kind of trap, it's better than sitting around here doing nothing. This is the first solid lead we have. I say we go in with our eyes wide open and ready for anything."  
  
"Agreed," Kara said, her thoughts swirling around what Bruce had said earlier. A rocket in Smallville, taken by the Four. She tried to imagine an innocent baby in the hands of people like the ones Bruce had described.  
  
It filled her with a rage almost equal to that of Diana.  
  
TO BE CONTINUED 


	10. Who to Trust?

NOTE: Some research revealed to me that the hidden city of the Homo Magi was not, as said by Bruce Wayne in the last chapter, in the Rockies, but rather somewhere in Turkey (see JLA #164 for details). I have corrected that slight mistake.  
  
#  
  
Part 10: Who to Trust?  
  
#  
  
Kara watched helplessly as Diana sifted through the ashes of yet another destroyed city, this one little more than a whole in the ground with but the barest of structures still visible amidst the devastation.  
  
"You've been here before?" she asked, putting a hand on Diana's shoulder.  
  
"Once," the amazon answered sadly. "Zatanna was looking for her mother, one of the Homo Magi. We found her but ... let's just say things didn't end all that well." She sighed deeply, looking out across the destroyed city. "These were not good people living here, Kara, but they didn't deserve this."  
  
"No one does," Kara answered, squeezing Diana's shoulder a little tighter.  
  
Just a few hours ago they had agreed to meet Bruce Wayne tomorrow in order to hammer out a plan to take on the Four, wherever they might be. Bruce hadn't been happy about the delay, but had finally agreed.  
  
The four misplaced heroes had wanted those 24 hours to check out a few of the things Bruce had told them, not quite ready to trust the man despite the close ties they had all had with his counterparts on Earths 1 and 2. This was a different world and might have created a different man.  
  
Helena and Dick were busy digging into records, looking for any trace of the Four, anything to verify the tale Bruce had told them about these four people who supposedly controlled the fate of this world without anyone knowing it. Kara and Diana, meanwhile, were making a fast track around the world to check some of the places where the Four had been busy.  
  
One of them was this city. Or what had once been a city.  
  
"Any sign of survivors?" Diana asked.  
  
Kara swept the crater with her superhuman senses. "Nothing. Everything has been reduced to ashes, I can barely make out the traces of organic residue among it. Only thing out of place is ... well, there is a human body lying at the edge of the crater. Judging by the rate of decay I'd say he died about thirty years ago."  
  
Diana nodded, her face grim. "That's probably John Zatara, Zatanna's father. In our world he was mortally wounded and stumbled upon this city by accident. Sindella, Zatanna's mother, saved his life."  
  
Kara understood without Diana needing to explain further. In this world there had been no city to find here, no one to help John Zatara. Just one more body among the wreckage.  
  
"Let's get out of here," Kara finally said. "We've got a bit more ground to cover before we meet the others." In truth she just wanted to leave this place, both for her own peace of mind and that of Diana, whose mood seemed to grow grimmer and grimmer with every moment they spent in this world.  
  
A moment later the two heroines were underway again.  
  
#  
  
Helena was trying to concentrate on her work, but her thoughts kept straying to other things. Things like the man who had visited them a few hours ago. The man who, in another world, had been her father.  
  
One would think she'd be used to it by now. She had met the Earth-1 Batman dozens of times, before and after her father had been killed. Yet it had always been hard, there was no getting used to it. And now, with their own world gone, all the people she knew either wiped out or having forgotten her existence, she had to meet another version of her father.  
  
Maybe the universe had a lot of fun playing these kinds of tricks on her. Or maybe it just didn't give a damn what she felt. Either way she didn't much like it.  
  
"I've rechecked our original findings," Dick said, catching her attention. "It all still holds up. Bruce works for the FBI as a profiler. The Wayne fortune is administered through several trust funds. Bruce still holds the majority shares for Waynetech and several other companies, but apparently isn't active in regards to the day-to-day business."  
  
Not that he ever was, Helena mused. On her world her father had played the role of the idiot playboy to cover up his activities as Batman, only getting involved in the business when it was absolutely necessary. After his retirement as a crime fighter he had gone to work as Gotham City's police commissioner, taking over for the retired James Gordon. On Earth-1, she knew, Bruce Wayne was still playing the rich idiot for all he was worth.  
  
Calling herself to order, she tried to concentrate on her own research. Getting a hang of the Internet hadn't been difficult, but both their hacking skills were rather lacking, being eighteen years behind technologically. Helena had chosen the old-fashioned way of doing things, breaking into several public records buildings to acquire what they needed.  
  
Only there wasn't a single trace to be found of anything relating to this Artemis project or the four people Bruce had told them of. The Four, she repeated in her mind. Four people with superpowers who had committed unspeakable atrocities on this world and gotten away with it.  
  
So far, she emphasized for herself. Only so far.  
  
A breeze of wind announced the arrival of their two superhuman friends and Helena looked up from the stolen records with a sigh, rubbing her tired eyes.  
  
"Hope you were more successful than us," she told Kara and Diana.  
  
Diana, she immediately saw, had dark circles under her eyes and her hands seemed to be permanently clenched into fists.  
  
"What little Bruce told us checked out," Kara said, keeping one eye on Diana at all times. "The city of the Homo Magi in Turkey was destroyed. I managed to spot several satellites in orbit that, while appearing to be TV satellites, actually house some kind of beam weapons. They are inactive, though. No trace to be followed, I fear."  
  
She hesitated a moment before adding, "We also went to Smallville. I didn't take the time to really look around the first time I was there, but upon a closer look ... there is some residual shrapnel of Kryptonian origin to be found beneath the soil." She almost chocked on those last words.  
  
Helena knew what that meant. If Bruce was right than the rocket carrying the last son of Kryption to Earth had been found not by a pair of Kansas farmers who would love and care for the child, but rather by the Four. God alone knew what they had done with him.  
  
"I'm afraid we came up pretty empty," Dick said, his tone of voice clearly telling that he was trying to change the topic for the sake of Kara. "What we originally found on Bruce checks out and there is no trace to be found on this Artemis thing. Nothing."  
  
"There wouldn't be," Diana said, her voice carrying a sharp edge of simmering anger. "If these Four are as Bruce has said they would have taken great care to wipe out all proof of their existence."  
  
"Let's say everything he told us is true," Helena interjected. "That still leaves us with the question of how he knew about us. Where we come from and how to find us."  
  
"He said he would tell us once we agreed to join him."  
  
Dick's lips spread in a bit of a smile. "How about we don't wait quite that long? I looked into the city's maps a bit and, while the cave below Wayne manor is apparently empty, I know the Bruce of Earth-1 had a second cave beneath a Wayne building directly in Gotham. A cave that appears on the old city maps back in the 1950s, but is curiously absent from the more recent ones."  
  
Helena smiled as well. "Wanna bet some things never change from world to world?"  
  
#  
  
Finding the cave was surprisingly difficult, even taking Kara's superhuman senses into account. They only found because they knew exactly where it had to be. Kara couldn't tell what kind of technology was used to hide it, but it was definitely far in advance of everything humans had ever come up with, even eighteen years into the future.  
  
Once they did find it, though, breaking in wasn't difficult at all. The booby traps erected to surprise unwelcome visitors were quickly found and disabled, either by Kara or by Helena and Dick's deep knowledge of how their mentor had worked. Apparently some things really didn't change much from world to world.  
  
The cave itself, though, did look quite different from either of those the four of them were familiar with. There was no costume vault, no launching ramp for the Batmobile, no giant penny or dinosaur robot. The only thing familiar was the giant computer array in one corner, a single seat in front of it.  
  
"Do you suppose he built all this just to battle the Four?" Kara asked.  
  
"If there is one common trait among all the Bruce Waynes I've known," Dick answered, "it's that they don't do things halfway. Our Bruce dedicated his fortune, his skills, his entire life to the battle against crime. I'm not surprised this world's version has done the same, only with a slightly different goal."  
  
Kara quickly took a look around, her senses easily penetrating all the walls now that they were inside whatever had been used to hide this cave so effectively. Within a minute she spotted something. Something that was definitely familiar.  
  
"I think I have found the reason why this Bruce knows so much about us," she whispered, her eyes riveted to a certain spot on the wall.  
  
"What? What is it?"  
  
Not answering the question she walked towards the wall in question, her fingers quickly finding the hidden latch and opening the heavy door without so much as a strain. A sour odour greeted them as they stepped inside.  
  
"What is he keeping in here?" Dick asked, revolted. "It smells like something has died in here a couple of times over and ..."  
  
He fell silent as he finally saw what Kara had spotted from outside. His eyes needed a long moment to make sense of what it was he was seeing and, even then, he needed yet more time until recognition set in. Not that he could be blamed for that. He had seen the occupant of the room only a handful of times in his life and he had looked a lot better then.  
  
"Dear God," he whispered.  
  
Diana was the first to step closer to the mangled figure that rested on a table in the centre of the room, her eyes not showing rage for once, but deep sadness and compassion.  
  
"J'Onn?"  
  
#  
  
The man's dark eyes were fixed on the TV screen, tuned to one of the many stations that were still showing the images captured in Washington just yesterday. A flying woman. A flying woman who wore a very familiar costume.  
  
"This can't be," the man murmured over and over again.  
  
Over the course of the last few months he had come to the conclusion that this world was not one of the few he was familiar with. It was a completely strange place and he didn't know of any way to get back to his homeworld. If it still existed at all, that was.  
  
Suddenly his phone rang, tearing him out of his thoughts. He considered simply letting it ring, but then reached over to pick up the receiver anyway.  
  
"Hello, sir," an unknown voice said from the other end. "I believe we can be of tremendous service to each other."  
  
"I'm not interested in buying anything."  
  
He was about to hang up again, but the voice stopped him with its next words: "We know you are not from around here. We also know that you ... how shall I put it ... haven't exactly been yourself since coming here. We can fix all that. Are you still not interested?"  
  
He hesitated only for the briefest of moments.  
  
"I'm listening." Clark Kent leaned back in his chair, settling down for a long conversation.  
  
TO BE CONTINUED 


	11. The Last Son of Mars!

Part 11: The Last Son of Mars  
  
#  
  
If Kara had been listening, she would have heard the footsteps approaching them a mile away, stealthy as they might have been. As things were, though, she was completely fixated on the mangled figure in front of her and found herself frozen by the sight of a man who, in another world, had been a close friend of her cousin and one of the greatest heroes the universe had ever seen.  
  
"J'Onn?" Diana whispers, taking a step forward. "Great Hera, what did they do to you, J'Onn?"  
  
J'Onn J'Onnz, the Martian Manhunter. Founding member of the Justice League of America, the world's greatest superheroes. Kara had only met him a handful of times, but from those few meetings she knew him to be a gentle being, a hero through and through, and if nothing else she could easily emphasize with him, for the pain of surviving when their home world died had shaped them both.  
  
This was a different J'Onn, she reminded herself. The one from this Earth, or this universe's Mars, rather. And by the looks of things he had suffered a fate much worse than his Earth-1 counterpart.  
  
J'Onn was a shapeshifter, able to take on just about any form he wanted to, but Kara doubted he intentionally looked like this. His form was mangled, the shape of a man who had had every bone in his body broken, only to have them grow back together badly and then broken again. Much of his green skin was covered with burn scars. Fire, Kara remembered. The one great weakness Martians had. J'Onn looked like he had walked through the fires of Hell themselves and what had come out the other side was but a shadow of the man he had been.  
  
"I see you have met my ace in the hole," a voice from behind them wrenched them all out of their shock. They turned to see Bruce Wayne standing there, a grim look on his face.  
  
Before Kara could even think of doing anything Diana was moving, hoisting Bruce up by the lapels of his jacket and slamming him into the nearest wall.  
  
"You have five seconds to convince me that this isn't your doing, Wayne," she hissed into his face. "Start talking!"  
  
Bruce opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. For a moment the room around them seemed to waver and Kara had a second to recognize the tingling sensation of telepathic contact somewhere inside her head, then the whole world changed.  
  
They were standing in a room, some kind of laboratory, and saw an old man working on a complicated piece of machinery. He didn't react to their presence at all. A memory, Kara realized. They were seeing a memory.  
  
"That should do it," the old man mumbled and somehow Kara knew that his name was Erdel. Dr. Saul Erdel. The information just appeared in her mind out of nowhere.  
  
He took a moment to proudly regard the machine in front of him. It was clearly of alien origin, covered with markings that Kara thought she might have seen before somewhere. Interlac? No, not quite. Some other alien language.  
  
Some parts of the machine had obviously been reconstructed using human technology. Kara couldn't make heads or tails of it. Erdel walked to the control panel and activated it with the air of a child about to unwrap its Christmas presents.  
  
"J'Onn told me about this," Kara heard Diana whisper. "This is the day he came to Earth. This Dr. Erdel somehow found a piece of Martian machinery, some kind of teleportation technology, and spent the largest part of his life restoring it to working order."  
  
Even as she spoke the words Dr. Erdel, having taken but a moment to turn on the video camera standing on a tripod in the corner of the room, activated the machine and a humming began to fill the room. Light spewed forth from the platform at the centre of the lab. Within a few moments the watching heroes could see the faint outline of a presence within the light. A presence that was quite definitely not human.  
  
"It works," Dr. Erdel shouted, excited. "It's actually working."  
  
He didn't have long to celebrate. The images flashed forward, showing a hulking green alien stepping off the platform, shaking from the trauma of teleportation. Was this J'Onn's natural form, she wondered? His form rake- thin, his head elongated to something resembling a hammerhead? She would have to ask Diana about that.  
  
Dr. Erdel approached him, but J'Onn was clearly out of his mind. He trashed around, smashing the carefully restored machinery with his superhuman strength, hurling the merely human doctor into a wall where he came to lie still.  
  
"Is this how it happened in our world?" Kara asked Diana.  
  
"I'm not sure. J'Onn seldom speaks of his past. He once told me that Dr. Erdel nursed him back to health, but also did something to his mind, which caused him to believe that all his people on Mars had died. Much later he found out that some of them were still alive and helped them colonize a new world in another star system."  
  
About three seconds later it became apparent that things hadn't happened quite the same way here on this world. Dr. Erdel was moaning in the corner, clearly hurt, and J'Onn was slowly beginning to calm down when the whole building started to shake. Man and alien alike froze, staring upwards, just in time to see the ceiling being ripped away.  
  
"Best we can tell," Bruce's voice intruded into the memory, "the Four somehow picked up the energy spike from the teleportation device and the alien life signs. They wanted to make sure that their personal playground remained free of advanced alien technology, at least when it wasn't in their possession, or possible alien beings that could rival their power."  
  
Light burst through the laboratory as the building crumbled around them, the very air around them turning to fire. They could hear J'Onn scream, a completely alien sound that seemed to tear away at their very souls. Then the images faded, to be replaced by blackness.  
  
An indeterminate amount of time later the world around them came back into focus, showing a condemned building in a large city somewhere. A man was walking towards it and it took them but a moment to recognize Bruce, though he was quite a bit younger in this memory.  
  
"I was 21 at the time," Bruce's voice once again provided the commentary. "I had only just started working for the FBI as a field agent and was investigating a rumour regarding some kind of disfigured stalker in this part of the city. The police had called us in on this because quite a few homeless people had vanished around these parts and they thought they might be dealing with some kind of serial killer or such.  
  
"They never saw him, never even came close. They were all convinced to leave this area alone via telepathic suggestion, but of course we didn't know that at the time."  
  
They watched the younger Bruce walk into the building, a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other. From the way he held the weapon they could clearly see that he didn't much like firearms. Kara knew of the deep psychological scars Bruce had suffered by watching his parents being gunned down when he was but eight years old. For the longest time she herself had thought she had lost her own parents to an uncaring universe, only to have them miraculously restored to her years later. That latter part was something Bruce, be it the one she had known or this one, had never been blessed to experience.  
  
The scene shifted once again and they saw him enter a room that might have been part of a nice apartment several decades ago. In the far corner something huddled, something that seemed to draw in Bruce like a moth to the flame.  
  
"He had used his powers to prevent anyone from seeing him," Bruce explained, "but for some reason he connected with me. Some sort of kindred spirit maybe, I don't know. He revealed himself to me."  
  
Young Bruce's face contorted with shock as he came face to face with the alien, but he didn't start running away or firing. The two men, so very different on the surface, stared at each other for a long time.  
  
"He showed me the same memories he's showing you right now. How he came here, how he was attacked but seconds later. He also showed me the faces of those responsible."  
  
The memory began to fade and they were back in the room they had started in, Diana still holding Bruce against the wall. The rage had faded from her face somewhat, though.  
  
"He had used his telepathy to learn about the Four and I learned about them from him. Ever since that day we have worked together. The fire crippled his body, but it didn't affect his mind. Thanks to him I've managed to stay one step ahead of the Four for all these years and he also told me about you. Who you are and where you come from."  
  
Diana slowly lowered him to the ground, the look of suspicion on her face slowly fading. She turned to look at J'Onn. This was no more the man she had known as a friend and colleague on her world then Bruce was, but somehow she found herself extending more trust towards him right at the start. Maybe it was his state of being, nothing but pity, but she doubted it.  
  
When the Justice League had first come together many of the others had been somewhat distrusting of J'Onn, an alien who had hidden among mankind for so long. Even Clark, an alien himself, had found himself a bit suspicious of this utterly inhuman man. It had been Diana and Arthur, Aquaman, who had first opened themselves up to the Martian. Stranger in this world themselves, they had formed a natural bond.  
  
Maybe that was what she felt with this J'Onn as well. He, too, was a complete stranger in this world. Like her and her friends he had been welcomed with carnage and destruction, had no idea whether his home still existed, whether his people where still alive.  
  
Strangers in a strange land, she mused. Hurt by the same people. United in a quest for vengeance? No, she reprimanded herself. Not vengeance! Justice! The murderers of her sisters in this world couldn't go free. They deserved to be punished for all they had done. This was not about the rage she felt churning deep inside of herself. It was about justice!  
  
"J'Onn?" she finally said. "I realize we've never met before, but in my world we were good friends. Is he telling the truth?"  
  
The mangled figure slowly sat up, every motion clearly showing how much it hurt him to do even that much. Kara could see that he was wearing some kind of walking aids, supporting his shattered body to a limited capacity.  
  
"It is true," he finally said, his voice raspy and barely more than a whisper. "I know you knew him in your world as well, Diana. I have seen it. He is not the same man, but you can trust him."  
  
Diana looked at him for a long moment, human eyes locked with alien orbs, searching for signs of the man she had known. Finally she turned to look at the others and nodded.  
  
"Well, Mr. Wayne," Kara told their host. "I guess it is safe to say we are on board. Now how about you tell us how we can take down these 'Four' you have told us so much about?"  
  
TO BE CONTINUED 


	12. Confrontations

Author's Note: Yes, I know it's been an age since I updated this story. Sorry about that, but my muse is a fickle thing. I worked on this chapter on and off for at least a month now. The next chapter will hopefully be a little easier, as we finally get some super-action around here. I hope to get it done a little faster this time.

Enjoy and take care!

#

Part 12: Confrontations

#

Helena Wayne was lurking in the shadows of Bruce Wayne's underground cave (it felt wrong to call it the Batcave, seeing as this Bruce Wayne had never been Batman) and watched the man sitting at the large computer type away on his keyboard. Bruce Wayne, the man who, in another world, was her father.

During the last few days she had pieced something together. This Bruce Wayne knew who they were, where they came from. He knew thanks to the telepathic powers of the Martian J'Onn J'Onnz. After this initial revelation Helena had first assumed that he also knew who Helena was. Who she had been to his doppelganger on Earth-2. But over the last few days it had become apparent that he did not know.

Apparently J'Onn had respected some boundaries of privacy when deciding what information to share with Bruce and what not. Either that or he hadn't read her deep enough to find out who her father had been. Whatever the reason, Bruce clearly did not know.

After they had given their commitment to help him bring down the Four Bruce had been very open with them. Clearly not so much because of his open and sharing personality, but rather because he knew that he had just been handed his greatest chance of taking down the people he regarded as the greatest evil in the world. For better or worse he had cast his lot in with them and the only way they had a decent chance of succeeding was by working together without any holding back.

Which had led Helena to a decision. The first time she had met the Batman of Earth-1 during one of the annual JLA-JSA team-ups she had been distracted all the time, nearly to the point of messing up an important mission and getting a few good people killed. Only after talking with this new Bruce, sharing who she was and how his presence made her feel, had things improved. It had gotten worse again after her father had died, but eventually she had overcome that, too.

They were stuck on an unfamiliar Earth and due to fight a group of superbeings who had secretly ruled this world for the better part of forty years. They couldn't afford any sort of distraction. She needed to have a clear head for the upcoming battle, which meant she had to talk to this version of Bruce Wayne.

Had to talk to him and tell him exactly who she was, who they had been in another world.

Deciding to get it over with she slipped out of the shadows and approached him. She saw the slightest tensing of his shoulders the moment he noticed her approach, but nothing else. This man was not quite as good as her father had been, but he was still one of the best.

"We need to talk about something," she told him.

#

Several hundred meters above the cave Kara was faced with a somewhat similar situation. Shortly after their first meeting J'Onn they had been introduced to another of Bruce Wayne's close associates in his secret war against the Four. And yet again it was someone who, in another world, had been close to the exiled superheroes. Specifically to Kara.

"Are you okay?" Barbara Gordon asked, seeing the thoughtful look on Kara's face.

"Just thinking," she answered, not quite knowing what she was to say instead. Hey, Barbara! We've never met before three days ago, but in another world you and I were best friends. Want to do a little female bonding?

She shook her head. How had Kal handled it? Travelling to parallel worlds, meeting people who were so familiar yet at the same time complete strangers. 

"This is really amazing," Barbara said, oblivious to her thoughts. "I mean, I read a lot about what the Four can do, what powers they have, but you I actually saw on national TV. Flying, lifting an airplane above your head ..."

"I tend to forget sometimes," Kara answered. It had always been easy to talk to Barbara, maybe she could recapture some of that here. "When you do this sort of stuff everyday it's easy to overlook how it must seem to other people. Plus, on our world there are quite a few people who can do the same."

"So J'Onn told me. I'm still having a bit of trouble believing it, to be honest. Another world. Probably another me running around." She looked down at her legs and a look of sadness came onto her face. 

Almost as big a shock as meeting this parallel version of her best friend had been learning that she was paralysed from the waist down. When Kara had researched the doppelgangers of her friends on this world she had learned that Barbara had worked for the FBI, only to become involved in some kind of mission gone sour that left her crippled. No details, though.

Now she saw what had happened, had been told how it came about. A serial killer called Jack Napier, originally a small-time hood who flipped out one day and started killing people left and right. The task force Barbara belonged to tracked him down, but he surprised them and put a bullet through her spine before being shot himself. Napier died, Barbara was left like this.

Instead of surrendering to misery, though, Barbara had decided to recreate herself. No longer able to go after the bad guys in the field, she became the FBI's premier researcher and computer specialist. A few years later she was approached and recruited by Bruce for his crusade against the Four. Both still worked for the FBI, but now spent most of their time pursuing something their employers never learned about.

She had told Kara of her nickname among the hacker-crowd. They called her Oracle.

"You didn't happen to know me in that other world, did you?" Barbara asked, clearly not expecting a positive answer.

Kara thought about it for just a minute, then nodded.

"Yeah. I did know you, Babs."

#

"Can I talk to you for a second?"

Diana looked up, seeing Dick enter the room. Since they had taken up residence in Bruce Wayne's apartment tower they had barely seen each other. All of them had been busy reading up on the enormous pile of information Bruce had assembled on the Four, familiarizing themselves with their enemies.

"What is it?" she asked, inviting him to sit down.

There was a look of worry on Dick's face, one barely disguised by what Diana had always thought of as 'Bat-Face'. A peculiar talent all those associated with Batman seemed to have, projecting a grim and gritty façade that managed to fool most of the people looking at them into thinking they were cold, hard, and emotionless. Diana had seen it a few times too often to be fooled, though.

"I've spent quite a few hours talking with Bruce," he began. "It was weird, and not just because of who he is."

"What do you mean?"

A humourless smile appeared on his face. "I used to say that Bruce, my Bruce, always had a plan, even when it came to going to the john. He was never without a plan. Always had contingency strategies, back-ups, everything. After looking at the information the Bruce here has assembled on the Four I asked him what his plans were for afterwards."

"Afterwards? You mean after we take down the Four."

"Yes. From everything I've read it seems they assembled quite a collection of alien and exotic technology, used their influence to prevent quite a few technological and medical advancements from becoming public. If ... when we take them down, all that stuff will be there and we'll have to decide what to do with it."

Diana nodded. She hadn't really thought that far ahead, the need to see justice done for her sisters' murder clouding all else. The warrior-part of herself had some chiding remarks for that. Thinking ahead was always crucial.

"What does Bruce have in mind?" she asked.

"I shouldn't have been surprised," he said, rubbing his chin where greying beard-stubble was growing. "Bruce, in any world, is a control freak. He wants to keep everything under wraps. Release it slowly, if at all."

Diana nodded. She had expected as much.

"And you have a problem with that?"

"I ... I'm not sure. This world has suffered quite a lot thanks to the Four's keeping so much from the public, but ... I keep thinking that we, both the Justice Society and your own Justice League, we have withheld quite a bit from the world as well, haven't we? Advanced alien technology we got our hands on, things that could have improved life for everyone, and we withheld it."

He looked up at her. "Why do we do that, Diana? Is what we have done so different from what the Four did to this world? Why do we treat the people like children who are not ready for ..."

"Because they aren't ready," Diana interrupted him. "You are right. There are a lot of things we could have shared with the world. Technologies that would have made life easier, better. But ... Dick, I'm a lot older than you. And though I've spent most of my life cooped up on a secluded island, I've seen quite a bit of human history. Every single technological advancement was immediately corrupted, used to make better weaponry, used for violence. Mankind's technology has matured a lot faster than their common sense, their compassion, their moral responsibility.

"No matter what most people might think, Dick, the advancement of a society isn't measured by the size of their guns or the amount of people they can kill in one fell swoop. Mankind is not ready for the things we could have given them. It would be as irresponsible for us to share the technologies we have acquired over the years with them as giving a loaded gun to a three-year-old."

Dick was still looking at her, seeming old and tired.

"You don't have a high opinion of mankind, do you?"

"I think there are brilliant and compassionate men and women out there, Richard. People like you, people like the members of the Society and the League. I know, though, that they are few and far between. I know that most people in your culture celebrate democracy as the ultimate form of society, but I don't. Because when the majority of the people make the decisions, the decisions will always be influenced by ignorance and fear."

Dick shook his head. "I can't accept that. There is more to humanity than ignorance and fear, Diana."

"So what do you want to do, Dick? Give everything we find to ... whom? The US President? The United Nations? The European Union? The dictator of some African country? Do we give it to everyone or just those we consider worthy? Whom?"

Looking down, Dick sighed deeply.

"So what? We're going to continue to keep it all hidden? Leave the world in the dark just like the Four did?"

"Maybe. What we won't do is kill innocent people in the process, Richard. We are nothing like them."

Dick rose from his chair, seeming ten years older than before.

"I hope you are right about that, Diana. I hope you are right."

#

Bruce Wayne was sitting in his chair, brushing a hand through his hair as he was obviously searching for words. Helena just looked at him, waiting for his reaction.

"I thought there was something familiar about you," he finally said. "You did call yourself Wayne, I knew that, but I didn't expect ..."

When he looked up at her his eyes were filled with undeniable curiosity.

"Who is your mother?"

Helena clamped down on the feelings of sadness welling up inside her. Her mother had been dead for years now. Talking about her shouldn't be hurting so much.

"Selina Kyle."

If she had been hoping for recognition from Bruce she was disappointed.

"Sorry, never heard of a woman by that name."

It figured, Helena thought. He and Selina had met through their costumed alter egos, Batman and Catwoman. Since neither of them seemed to have taken up the costumed lifestyle in this world there was little reason for them to ever have encountered the other. During their initial research into this world Helena had looked up the name of her mother, but came up empty. Either she had never existed here in the first place or lived somewhere beyond the reach of American bureaucracy.

"I'd say it's a safe bet you would have liked her," Helena said, looking to lighten the mood. "The Bruce Waynes of two different worlds both fell for her."

A small smile graced Bruce's lips. "She must be a beautiful women. I can't see you getting your looks from me."

Helena gave him a smile in turn. She was somewhat surprised at how good it felt to see him smile. Her father had learned to smile only late in life. The murder of his parents and his grim existence as Batman had not left much room for happiness. Only when marrying her mother had he acquired the skill of allowing himself to be happy. It was a skill he had almost forgotten again after her death and only having Helena in his life had prevented him from sliding down into despair.

From all she could tell this Bruce Wayne had been alone ever since that night when he was eight years old.

"I imagine this is a little less weird for you," Bruce said. "I'm what? The third Bruce Wayne you have met?"

"The fourth, actually," she answered, thinking of Owlman of Earth-3. That man had had absolutely nothing in common with her father, but he had still carried the name. "It's still weird, though. Every single time."

He nodded, having little trouble imagining the weirdness right now.

#

"Okay, now you're just having fun with me," Barbara laughed. "You and I fought against Cleopatra?"

"Not Cleopatra," Kara told her, laughing as well. "A woman who'd accidentally been taken over by the sceptre of Ra, a magical artefact that the original Cleopatra had used to mind-control her subjects."

Barbara shook her head, trying to get her laughing under control. "I can't believe another me ran around dressed as a bat. Riding a bat-cycle. Using bat-arangs. Where did she get the idea?"

"From Bruce, actually. He was Batman."

A new fit of laughter erupted from Barbara. This one, though, was cut short when the monitors around her suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree, displaying some kind of alarm message.

"What's going on?" Kara asked, on her feet in a second.

"Some kind of disturbance in Metropolis. I'm picking up police transmission, news reports, even military calls. Something ... no, someone is tearing up the city. I'll try and get some kind of broadcast."

Moments later the large screen in front of them lit up and showed a picture of downtown Metropolis. The city was in chaos. Dark pillars of smoke rose from ruined buildings; fires were burning in at least a dozen locations. Kara could hear screams, both from the screen and her own super-hearing, now that she was focusing.

Kara could immediately think of half a dozen supervillains who might be causing this, but then reminded herself that this world didn't have any supervillains except the Four, and they didn't do public appearances. So who ...?

"The police scanners have a visual of the attacker," Barbara said. "I'm trying to get the picture."

Moments later they saw the attacker and Kara was certain she felt her heart stop. It was a man in his mid- to late thirties, dressed in casual street clothing, and lifting a car over his head as if it was nothing but a toy. Moments later he sent it flying into the nearest skyscraper, causing the building to shake.

Her eyes were fixed on his face. A face so familiar.

A moment later she was gone, heading towards Metropolis at best speed. The only thing Barbara heard from her before she seemingly disappeared into thin air was one word.

"Kal!"

TO BE CONTINUED


	13. Title Bout

Part 13: Title Bout

#

National defence radar had but a moment to pick up an object speeding along the Eastern Seaboard at several times the speed of sound, leaving sonic booms in its wake. With most of the country's military attention already focused on the events taking place in Metropolis it was quickly discovered that this object was heading there as well. By the time they reached that conclusion the battle for Metropolis had already been joined, of course.

Kara pushed her speed as much as she could inside an atmosphere, leaving a blazing trail as the air around her was super-heated by her passing. She didn't care. Her eyes were already fixed on the city of Metropolis, only now appearing behind the planetary curve, and the figure tearing it apart right at this second.

Her thoughts were way ahead of her. How could this be? Kal? What was he doing? Why was he doing it? How could he even be here?

Even as her mind was thus occupied, though, her body sprang into action. Innocents were in danger. Kal was using his near-limitless power with abandon and dozens, if not hundreds of people had already fallen victim to his onslaught. Skyscrapers were tumbling, fires were burning, everything was quickly descending into chaos.

Kara adjusted her heading and sped directly toward the figure at the centre of the carnage, preparing to hit him at just the right angle to send them both careening out of the city at an upward angle and away from innocent bystanders.

Unfortunately Kal saw her coming.

The two people collided with enough force to shatter the windows of the surrounding buildings, causing a lethal rain of shards to come down onto the streets of Metropolis. Had anyone been stupid enough to stand close and watch he would have seen nothing but blurs as the two superbeings bombarded each other with punches that could split mountains in two, all within the blink of an eye.

Kara could count on one hand the times she had been forced to face-off against someone as powerful as herself. The Phantom Zone criminals, the Daxamites enslaved by Darkseid in the 30th century, a handful of others. Most of the times she was fighting people whom she would kill with a casual blow if she wasn't careful. As a result she had fallen into the habit of pulling her punches.

Her opponent seemed to have no such problem.

Taking the worst part of the furious exchange of blows, Kara broke off the in-fight and tried to get some distance between herself and Kal, hoping to catch her breath. It was not to be. In a blur of speed her larger opponent was upon her once again, hands that could crush mountains with ease closing around her neck before she could do anything to stop it. She sent a staggering kick into Kal's midsection, but it didn't make him let go.

A moment later she found herself flung face-first into the nearest building and thousands of tons of steel and concrete rained down on her.

#

"What's going on?" Diana yelled, storming into the office that Barbara Gordon had converted into one of the finest surveillance centres anywhere in the world. On numerous screens the carnage currently happening in Metropolis was displayed live and in colour.

"Someone is destroying the city," Barbara told her, her voice calm but with an undertone of panic. "Someone who is definitely superhuman. Kara took one look at him and vanished."

A moment later several of the screens went black and a thunderous crash could be heard over the speakers. Those monitors still intact showed windows blowing outwards, the ground shaking, and a huge explosion blossoming in the heart of the city.

"I'd say she just arrived at the scene," Helena offered, having slipped into the room unnoticed.

"Barbara, do you still have the picture of the attacker?" Diana asked, trying to figure out who might be causing this carnage. One of the Four? Someone else stranded here from another world? The possibilities were endless.

"Yes, give me a moment." Barbara furiously typed on her keyboard. "There he is!"

Bruce and Richard arrived just in time to see the image of the attacker appear on the central monitor. An identical gasp could be heard from three different throats.

"Su-superman?" Helena took a step back, clearly shocked by the look of rage and violence on a face she knew so well. If Diana remembered right the Superman of her world had been a role-model for all superheroes even longer than her own world's version had been. While less physically powerful than his Earth-1 counterpart, Kal-L had been an inspiration and living legend for close to fifty years.

Clearly this was not him. Regarding the figure on the screen for a moment, Diana was fairly certain she knew exactly who this man was. It filled her with dread.

"I need to get to Metropolis," she just said, wishing for the thousandth time for the ability to actually fly instead of gliding on the winds. "I fear Kara may be outmatched against this foe."

Bruce nodded, unfamiliar with the situation, but clearly recognizing that Diana was the only one among them who had even the ghost of a chance to survive partaking in this kind of battle.

"I have a private plane in the underground hangar. I'll have you there in fifteen minutes."

"Let's hope that's quick enough."

#

Kara came to, feeling a great weight pressing down on her. She couldn't have been out for more than a few seconds, but she knew only too well how much time that was for someone with her level of power. Even while she was lying here Kal could be out there killing people again.

Why was he doing this?

With a groan she rose, pressing the weight of a collapsed building with relative ease. She was hurting, but there was a fight left to fight. Kal needed to be stopped. Everything else could be sorted out later.

Her thoughts couldn't help but stray to the handful of times she and her cousin had sparred before. The times it had been serious, more than good-natured wrestling, were few, but most of those times Kal had gotten the better of her. He was larger, stronger, and more experienced than her. Kara had taken to some old Kryptonian fighting techniques in order to make up for that, something her cousin had never bothered with, and the last match between them that she could remember had ended in a stalemate.

Finally breaking free of the rubble, Kara knew she could only win this if she banished everything else from her mind. No holding back, no emotions, just taking down an enemy, no matter that said enemy was her cousin.

Unfortunately he was upon her before she even managed to see him again. In a blur of pain he laid into her, super-speed punches hammering her indestructible flesh. Kara managed to strike back, but her opponent was relentless. For every blow she managed to land he hit her with two. A thunderous uppercut caught her right on the chin and she went flying again, tearing up the pavement as she landed. Blood was seeping from her mouth and she was fairly certain she was busted up internally.

Refusing to lie down, she got up again and managed to take Kal by surprise this time. Apparently he had thought her sufficiently subdued already. Pouring every bit of strength and speed she had into her attack she took him off his feet, slamming his body into the rubble of a skyscraper that had already collapsed. She was well aware that there were still people about. She needed to finish this as soon as she possibly could.

A kick that could have split a moon in two sent Kal flying upward, arcing through the sky. Kara followed him immediately, driving her shoulder into his body and propelling them even further upward at an angle that would take them out toward the ocean. The impact caused her to cry out in pain as something broken inside her body screamed in protest, but she did her best to ignore the agony.

Even before they managed to clear the city limit, though, Kal managed to spin around and grabbed her by the throat again. For a moment their respective powers of flight pushed against each other, one trying to continue the arc out to sea, the other pushing them back towards the ground. The air between them seemed to shimmer in protest to the energy expended.

Without warning Kal's eyes suddenly erupted in crimson light, sending twin beams of searing heat right into Kara's own eyes. She screamed again, her concentration breaking like cheap glass as the world around her drowned in red pain. Kal wasted no time and propelled them downward. Kara couldn't even try to turn before he drilled them both right into a skyscraper, sending them crashing through a hundred stories in a cacophony of tearing metal and pulverized concrete.

Blacking out again, the world only started coming back into focus for Kara when she felt her body being picked up from where it had come to rest amidst the wreckage. A hand strong enough to push the planet out of its orbit wrapped around her throat. She tried to fight, to move, but her body refused to obey. Everything hurt, her muscles protesting even the slightest movement.

"This is going to be fun," she heard a familiar voice, though the hate-filled tone was as foreign as anything in this strange new world. Managing to open her eyes, she saw Kal's face only inches away from hers, his eyes blazing with built-up power and anger.

"Why?" she managed. "Kal, why?"

A broad grin spread on Kal's face. The bruises beginning to show there only made it more terrifying.

"Oh, this is so much fun. You think I'm your loving cousin, don't you? That disgusting do-gooder from Earth-1."

Realization dawned on Kara. Why hadn't she thought of that? Of course this wasn't her cousin. Kal would never ... but that meant ...

"Allow me to introduce myself," the otherworldly doppelganger of Superman said. "I'm Ultraman. Pleased to meet you."

TO BE CONTINUED


	14. Crossing the Line

Part 14: Crossing the Line

#

The plane Bruce had stashed in the vast cave system beneath Gotham was state-of-the-art and barely five minutes later they were up in the air and speeding towards Metropolis at several times the speed of sound. Still, it wasn't fast enough for Diana. Not nearly fast enough. Supergirl had no idea what she had gotten herself into.

By now she was quite sure that the villain they were facing was indeed Ultraman, the Earth-3 doppelganger of Superman. Earth-3 had been a world almost geometrically opposed to their own. Britain fought for its independence against Imperial America. The Allies, consisting of Germany, Japan, Italy, and Austria had fought the Axis of Britain, France, Russia, and Ireland when the British Jews started slaughtering every single Christian in their country. And in present times this world had been ruled by the Crime Syndicate, that Earth's version of the Justice League.

Diana did not know how much Ultraman's personal history might match that of Kal-El, but she did know one thing. He was powerful. Potentially even more powerful than Superman due to one very dangerous aspect of his powers.

One that could prove lethal to Kara unless Diana got there soon.

#

A surge of different emotions went through Kara. Pain from the beating she had received, relief that this murderer in front of her was not really her cousin, shame for even thinking he might be, and rage. Rage was quickly getting the upper hand.

Her body was bruised and broken, but the realization that she was not facing her cousin in battle gave Kara a second wind. The psychological handicap she had put upon herself, holding back for fear of hurting someone she loved, fell away. Ultraman, who thought he had the battle won already, was quite surprised when Kara returned his earlier favour and sent a burst of concentrated heat vision right into his eyes.

Screaming, Ultraman stumbled back, his chokehold on Kara's neck loosening. With a burst of strength the Kryptonian woman fought free and almost fell to the ground, her knees weak and shaky. Cursing at herself she regained her footing.

When Ultraman's sight cleared up he almost took another step back, faced with the look of naked rage on Supergirl's face.

With a snarl she was upon him, ramming her smaller body into his like a torpedo. The impact sent shockwaves in all directions, reducing even more of the city to rubble, but right now Kara was beyond caring. Blow after super-speed blow rained down upon Ultraman, breaking at least one of his ribs and causing blood to gush from his broken nose and split lip. He landed blows in turn, but right now Kara barely seemed to feel them.

"You have no right wearing that face," she growled at him.

He would have growled something back, but her next blow hit his mouth and shattered several of his teeth. Incredible as it was, he seemed to be losing this battle. The girl was fighting with complete disregard for her own health and though she might well expire from the wounds he was giving her, right now it looked like she'd be fine with that if only she could kill him first.

As much as he hated it, it was time to play his ace in the hole.

Kara was in a frenzy. Some distant part of her still screamed that she was putting innocent lives on the line with every second she continued this fight. The city was crumbling around them and though the immediate vicinity was empty of civilians now (living ones anyway) the battle might well spill into populated areas at a moment's notice. She didn't care, though. All she cared about was this villain who wore her cousin's face, used his powers to kill the innocent. Yet another monster killing people left and right and laughing while he did it. Just like the Anti-Monitor. Someone had to stop the monsters. Whatever it took.

Suddenly, though, a sharp pain went through her body and she doubled over. Ultraman, now prone and bleeding, shoved her away and she hit the ground hard. It took her but a few moments to recognize the pain. She had felt it numerous times before, but never expected to feel it here.

Kryptonite!

Ultraman was holding a slice of glowing green rock in his hand, no telling where he had hidden it earlier, and managed to put a smile back on his ruined face. Even as she barely managed not to cry out from the pain she watched in amazement as his wounds started to heal at an advanced rate. What was going on? If he was a doppelganger of Kal he should be just as vulnerable to Kryptonite as she was.

"I guess your cousin never gave you the full story about me, did he?" Ultraman laughed, growing stronger by the second. "A delicious difference between your world and mine, really. While your world's Kryptonians die from this wonderful rock, I just grow stronger."

Bending down, his hand clamped around her throat once again and he picked her up like she weighed nothing. Kara wanted to resist, but he was shoving the Kryptonite into her face, its lethal radiation sapping what little strength remained in her body.

"Strong enough to snap your pretty little neck, I think." Ultraman's grin turned vicious.

Kara's eyes rolled back in her head as she started slipping into blessed unconsciousness when the grip around her neck suddenly fell away once more. She fell to the ground in a heap, the only thing she was aware of the little green Kryptonite slice, which fell to the ground by her side.

"Get it away from her," she heard someone yell. A familiar voice. Diana?

A shadow fell on her and she managed to look up, seeing a man bend over her. For a moment she panicked, thinking it was Ultraman coming to finish her off, but moments later she recognized Dick Grayson. Earth-2's Robin wasted no time picking up the Kryptonite and ran as fast as his legs would carry him, taking it out of range.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the pain started to fade. Someone was kneeling beside her and Kara turned over to see Helena. The young woman was hovering protectively, but her eyes were on something else. Kara managed to turn all the way and saw what she was looking at.

Diana had arrived and was laying into Ultraman with every bit of strength she had. The Earth-3 doppelganger of Superman was still standing, but taking quite a pounding. Kara managed a smile. Thankfully it seemed that he was every bit as vulnerable to Diana's magic-based powers as she herself was. Rao alone knew what might have happened to all of them if magic would have made him more powerful, too.

After less than a minute, though, it became apparent that Diana wouldn't win this fight. Ultraman had taken quite a beating earlier, but the brief exposure to Kryptonite had reinvigorated him. And magic or no magic, Diana was no match for a fully powered Kryptonian, especially one that had no scruples about using his full strength against her.

"What is it with you women?" Ultraman snarled, sending Diana flying with a vicious punch. "You think you can defeat me? I ruled an entire world. I beat the Supermen of two different dimensions. Nothing can defeat me."

Even though every single inch of her body howled in protest Kara managed to get back to her feet. Helena remained by her side, supporting her, a look of worry on her face.

"You can't go back in there," the young vigilante whispered to her. "You can barely stand."

"Diana will be killed unless I help her. Together we have a chance."

She tried to take a step, but immediately fell to her knees in pain. She could feel the broken bones inside her tearing her up. God, even the Anti-Monitor hadn't hurt her this badly. He had finished her off to quickly for her to feel this much pain. Well, maybe she couldn't stand, but there were other ways.

Ultraman was about to land a punch that would take Diana's head off when another burst of heat vision hit him in the small of his back. He screamed in pain, what little remained of his clothing burning away. He turned around, only to be hit with another burst in the face. Kara was almost dying from the effort it took to keep the blasts coming, but she kept up a barrage that sent Ultraman tumbling end over end into a heap of wreckage.

Diana, wiping blood from her face, struggled back to her feet.

"We need to end this," Kara heard her whisper.

Ultraman was also back on his feet, but visibly shaken. "You can't beat me," he grumbled, his voice slurred. "I'm all-powerful."

Diana landed a punch on his chin, sending him careening upward. A moment later Kara laid into him with her vision powers again, the impact driving him into the side of a crumbling skyscraper. When he peeled off the wall and started falling Diana was waiting again, dishing out a kick that would have sent Superman himself to the mat.

Ultraman was back on his feet again, though.

"Kry-Kryptonite," he stammered. "N-need ... where is ..."

He was weakening, Kara realized. The power burst the Kryptonite had given him was fading. Some of the wounds she had given him earlier seemed to be opening up again. Was it possible ...? In her world Kryptonians were powered by the sun while Kryptonite killed them. Kryptonite powered Ultraman. Was it possible that it was his sole power source? Would he lose all his powers if separated from it too long?

"Keep it up," Diana yelled, hitting him again. Somehow Kara found the strength for another heat vision attack. And another. And another. And Ultraman kept getting back up.

"W-won't beat me!" His face was a bloody mess, one of his eyes completely swollen shut. His left arm stood off at an impossible angle. "Won't be b-beaten by a b-bunch of ... w-women. I'm U-Ultraman."

Then he finally fell to his knees.

Kara barely had enough strength left to keep her eyes trained on him, certain that another burst of heat vision would kill her. They had him down, but what now? No telling if he wouldn't regain his strength even without the Kryptonite. They couldn't take that risk. Not after everything he had already done to this poor, defenceless world.

For a moment Kara took her eyes off Ultraman and met those of Diana, the two women sharing a moment of perfect understanding. Diana simply nodded. No words were needed.

"W-won't beat me," Ultraman whispered, but it was clear he was finished.

Slowly, limping from her injuries, Diana walked up behind him. Helena, who was so far out of her league in this battle that she felt uncomfortable even saying anything, watched in confusion before finally understanding what was about to happen. For a moment she seemed about to protest, but then shut her mouth and kept her silence.

Without another word Diana cupped Ultraman's chin with one hand, placed the other on the back of his head, and then twisted.

CRACK!

TO BE CONTINUED


	15. Recovery

Part 15: Recovery 

#

"I told you this was a bad idea, Randall," one of the three men said.

"Noted, William," the man called Randall replied.

"Don't give me that 'noted' crap, Randall! You fucked this up and fucked it up good. And the fuck-up is all over international TV."

The leader of the mysterious group known only as 'the Four' gave the youngest member of the quartet a stern look, but said nothing. There was very little to say. No matter how much it irked him, things hadn't gone according to plan.

The appearance of a previously unknown superbeing was not exactly an unprecedented occurrence. They had dealt with such beings in the past. Granted, this one was a lot more powerful than those they usually dealt with, but it shouldn't have been much of a problem. Using another previously unknown superbeing to take care of the matter should have solved the problem elegantly.

Only it hadn't.

"This Clark Kent ... Ultraman ... whatever he called himself, thoroughly bungled the job," Kim Süskind, the only female among the group, said. "At least we are spared the inconvenience of having to kill him ourselves."

Ultraman should have been the ideal pawn. Immensely powerful once exposed to a sample of the green xeno-mineral the Four had a small supply of, he could have been controlled easily by limiting his access to this 'Kryptonite', as he called it, and, if all else failed, simply eliminating him once his powers ran dry again. That the same mineral was toxic to the other superbeing, that blonde woman, had been an unexpected bonus.

Only the woman had survived, thanks to the intervention of yet more previously unknown superbeings. How many of them were there? The battle in Metropolis had seen at least three others, though only one of them was apparently powerful enough to go into combat with the likes of Ultraman. The other two, the ones who had come to the rescue of the injured blonde, had seemed powerless, or at least not in the same weight-class as the others.

Still, even having but two super-powered females on the loose with no information about them was something they could not tolerate.

"Did the satellites track them once they left Metropolis?" Jacob Greene asked. He and Randall had known each other the longest and were something very much like friends.

"No," Randall admitted. "They used some kind of stealth aircraft. Not up to our level of technology, of course, but good enough to disappear by flying close to the ground."

"Great," William ranted. "Not only are they super-powered, they also have some kind of technological backing. Randall, this is getting out of hand."

"And what do you propose we do then?"

William grinned, his hand bursting into flames as he drew a finger across his neck in an unmistakable gesture.

"Get rid of them. Lure them out and then sterilize whatever place they appear in."

"Taking into account the resiliency these two have shown," Kim added, "and leaving aside that we don't know the capabilities of their comrades, that would take a nuclear-level strike. Not something that can easily be hidden from the public."

"Who cares? This thing has been blown wide open already. The blonde was on TV saving that plane. A dozen news stations got recordings of the battle in Metropolis. The horses are out of the barn one way or another. If we end it quickly now things will settle down again soon enough. The little people forget what they can't understand."

"I hate to admit it," Jacob said, "but the kid here might be right. It's too late to sweep this under the rug, Randall. We need to take care of business before this actually gets serious."

Randall couldn't quite help a chuckle. Get serious? Jacob actually sounded as if he might think this could pose a threat to them personally.

"Very well. I will arrange something to draw them out. Then we will get rid of this little nuisance once and for all."

The other three nodded.

#

"How are Kara and Diana?" Bruce asked, nursing another cup of coffee. None of them had been sleeping much these past few days and events didn't seem likely to slow down anytime soon. Not after this.

"Diana is bruised and has a broken rib, but she'll be all right within a few days," Richard said. "Kara, well ... it's been a bit more complicated with her."

Bruce could imagine. How were you supposed to set broken bones and stitch open wounds when the patient was basically invulnerable? Not to mention that this same someone was also an alien that, while human in appearance, had quite a few anatomic differences. He heard Helena mumble that she wished someone called Dr. McNyder was here.

"We had no choice but to expose her to the Kryptonite again," Helena explained, "then have Diana set her bones with her greater strength and sew up her wounds while she was weakened. It was hell on her, but I think she'll be fine eventually."

"No internal injuries?"

"Impossible to tell. X-Rays can't penetrate her skin, it's too dense. We can only hope that her body can repair itself now that the worst is taken care of. She's resting at the moment."

Richard and Helena looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to fill them in on his doings.

"I had little problem with the autopsy," he explained. "It seems that this Ultraman lost all his powers after his death. Diana said that the source of them was that Kryptonite rock, but apparently it only works when he is alive. I briefly exposed his body to the rock, but it remained vulnerable."

"Any trace of how he came here or where he got the Kryptonite?" Helena asked.

"Well, I did discover one thing. Objects from parallel worlds possess a different vibratory rate on the quantum level than native objects. Ultraman has a different rate, so do all of you. The Kryptonite hasn't. It appears to be home-grown."

Richard was frowning, his mind already at work.

"So either he was incredibly lucky and found a chunk that landed here after this universe's Krypton's destruction, or ..."

Helena completed the thought. "Or someone gave it to him. Someone who somehow acquired Kryptonite and was smart enough to figure out what it would do for Ultraman."

Bruce nodded. "Kara told me that the UFO the Four were reported to have picked up in Kansas in 1967 was probably her cousin's rocketship. It's logical to think that, if that ship arrived here on a direct trajectory from Krypton, a few meteor rocks might have come along with it on the same heading. And were recovered by the Four when they found the rocket."

Helena closed her eyes. She could only imagine what the Four might have done with the infant Kryptonian inside the rocket.

"So the Four gave Ultraman the Kryptonite? Why?"

Bruce shrugged. "I would assume to take care of that flying blonde superwoman they saw on TV. Knowing them, they probably hoped the two would take care of each other."

Richard clenched his fist. "And the fact that thousands of people died in Metropolis?"

"Richard, if the stories I have told you about them haven't shown you how little regard they have for the innocent ..."

Slamming his fist on the table, Richard rose. "We need to do something, Bruce! We can't let them get away with this."

"We will do something," Bruce assured him. "First, though, we must wait for our two superwomen to recover. Without them we don't have much of a prayer, I'm afraid."

"And then?"

Now Bruce's face showed a tiny smile. "Then we'll take care of the Four. You see, I have an idea on that matter."

#

Kara woke and immediately groaned, wishing that she hadn't. Every single inch of her body was hurting. Never, not even during that time her powers had been on the fritz, had she ever been put through the wringer like this. She was lucky to be alive and knew it. This one had been too close for comfort.

Opening her eyes, she realized that she was in one of the bedrooms in Bruce Wayne's apartment tower. Moments later her hearing picked up the sound of someone breathing and she looked over to see Diana, resting on the other half of the bed. The Amazon was awake and looking at her.

"Feeling better?" Diana asked.

"No," Kara answered truthfully. "But I guess the fact that I'm hurting at all is something I should be grateful for. Thank you, Diana. I owe you my life."

Diana shook her head. "If we ever kept score of something like that our community back home would be entangled in so many life debts that it'd take forever to repay them all. Besides, Ultraman would probably have killed me, too, if you hadn't recovered in time to double-team him with me."

Kara nodded, but at the same time felt a cold, clammy hand around her heart. The memories of the battle rushed back, especially what happened at the end. What they had done to end it. Diana had been the one to actually do the deed, but Kara had agreed with her. Had seen it as the only option.

Thinking back, though, had she allowed her emotions to get the better of her? She had been so furious, seeing someone with Kal's face abuse his powers in that way. She had no idea how many people died in Metropolis, but it had to be hundreds, if not thousands. The thought that these people would remember the image of her cousin as a mass murderer ... had she allowed that to influence her decision?

"You're having doubts," Diana said, guessing at her thoughts. "Don't!"

"I can't help it." Turning back to lie on her back, Kara stared at the ceiling. "We killed him, Diana. We crossed a line."

Diana shook her head. "That man deserved death a thousand times over, Kara. After what he did every court in every world would have sentenced him to death."

"But we are not judge, jury, and executioner."

Diana gave her a look. "Aren't we?"

Kara sighed heavily, not liking the way this conversation was going. "You have changed since coming here, Diana. I'm not sure I like it."

"I have changed, yes, but not much." She rose, walking around the room. "When I first came to Man's World I was ... confused by quite a few of your practices. How you let criminals go due to a technicality. How you put small crooks in prison for decades, but allowed corporate leaders to get away with crimes much worse simply because they have money. The Justice League had the power to do so much good in the world, but restricted itself so much. We went after bank robbers, but when a dictator somewhere in the world slaughtered thousands of people we didn't get involved."

Diana turned to look at her. "I adapted. I knew that, if I wanted to fit into Man's World and teach them the Amazonian ways I needed to do things their way, bring about change gradually. Eventually I became so caught up in things that I almost lost sight of my original goal of changing the status quo, but I never saw things as black and white as most of my colleagues.

"Things are different in this world, Kara. We can't be as innocent here as we were back home. We can't afford it, the people of this world can't afford it."

Kara didn't want to hear this. "Kal taught me that killing is wrong. Always wrong."

"Your cousin is one of the best men I ever met," Diana said, "and it is important that someone like him, someone with so much power, set boundaries for himself. The temptation to change the world by force would be too great otherwise. But sometimes setting yourself boundaries like that is a luxury."

"So what?" Kara had tears in her eyes. "We just throw everything overboard? We kill our enemies before they kill us? How does that make us better than them?"

"We're better because we don't kill thousands of innocent people. We're better because we don't wipe out entire people just because we don't like them playing in our yard. We're better because we do what we do to help people, not leave them simpering in the dark."

One thing Kara did have to admit was that this world they called home for the time being was different. Harsher, edgier. Was it simply the absence of superheroes? Had the efforts of her colleagues back home made such a difference? Was it the manipulations of the Four? Or was it something else? An indefinable something that made Earth-1 so much more innocent than this place? She didn't know.

Harder measures for a harder world? Diana seemed to think so. Come to think of it, Kara really shouldn't have been that surprised. Her friend came from a race of warriors. She had read about the Amazons in ancient Greece. Diana had been brought up with their values. That she had adapted to Man's World to the degree she did was something of a puzzle. Kara had never thought of Diana as a warrior, though. Just another cape. One of the best and brightest, yes, but just another cape.

The capes were off now, it seemed.

TO BE CONTINUED


	16. The Plan

Author's Note: Yes, this story still lives. Sorry for the eternity without updates. I will try and wrap this up without too many further delays. Feedback always helps, of course.

---------------------------------

**Part 16: The Plan **

---------------------------------

"We need to seek a confrontation now," Bruce said.

Diana simply nodded, this was exactly what she wanted. Dick and Helena both seemed to agree with Bruce as well. Barbara was keeping to the background right now, still a little overwhelmed. There was a slight tingling in the back of her head that Kara had come to associate with the telepathic presence of J'Onn. So the gang was all here, assembled in the 'Bruce-Cave', as Helena had come to call it.

"We're not exactly in optimal shape," Kara reminded him. She was feeling better than yesterday, but not by all that much. She doubted she was anywhere near one hundred percent. Diana seemed fresher, but that might just be sheer determination.

"We realize that," Dick told her. "Unfortunately I don't think we have the luxury of waiting much longer. The Four know that this is not a mere stray superbeing that needs to be put down. They know that there are several of us, they know that we are organized, and they probably suspect that we have some kind of support system in place, given how quickly we disappeared from Metropolis."

Barbara nodded her agreement. "Judging by past behaviour patters, the Four will seek to end this matter as soon as possible, no matter the collateral damage. They will probably try and draw you out," she pointed at Kara and Diana, "and then use whatever firepower is necessary to kill you."

A few days ago Kara would have doubted that the Four had anything capable of killing her, but considering how close Ultraman had come to doing just that, she was no longer quite that certain. Invulnerability was relative. And it wasn't like others hadn't found ways to neutralize her powers in the past.

"We need to strike back at them and we need to do it where it hurts them," Bruce continued. "We have never been able to locate the Four's headquarters, but I think we might have found a way now."

He activated the large monitor, which showed a blueprint. Kara wasn't exactly a technical wizard, but she recognized parts of the design.

"That's Kryptonian technology," she gestured towards one part.

"Captured from the Four," Bruce told her. "We have been able to gather some bits here, some bits there, things they left behind now and then. It also incorporates some elements that J'Onn designed, as well as some latest Earth-grown technology."

"It's a scanner," Barbara clarified. "A scanner specifically attuned to the frequencies and energy signatures the Four use in their technology. We've never quite gotten it working right. The Four not only have heavy signal security, their technology is also a hybrid of so many different kinds..."

"Stolen and scavenged from the people they killed," Diana interjected.

"Yes. That mix of different technologies makes it difficult to track. Our current estimate is that we'd need at least several minutes to track a Four signal and it would have to be a pretty strong one."

Richard drove his right fist into his palm. "So we need to draw them out and get them to open up with some of their heavy tech. Then we can find out where they're hiding."

"Exactly."

Kara considered this. Draw out the Four. It sounded easy. Diana and she would just need to appear publicly somewhere. That would certainly do it. At the same time, though, that would almost certainly endanger innocents.

"It needs to be some sort of remote location," she finally said. "The Four won't hesitate to sacrifice however many people they need to."

"I have an idea about that," Bruce told her. "The Four are keeping close watch on Earth at all times and are usually able to spot any kind of unnatural or out-of-the-ordinary event within minutes. Which leads me to believe that they have some kind of heavy-duty satellite network in orbit. It's heavily cloaked, we've never been able to find it."

"Paradise Island was destroyed from orbital height," Diana growled, anger darkening her voice. "If it wasn't a ship of some kind, it's an orbital installation. And it will be heavily armed."

Dick nodded. "Kara can look for it. Her superior senses should make short work of any cloaking field they might have and seeing her approach should certainly put the Four in an uproar."

Kara wasn't exactly thrilled about going one-on-one with killer satellites that could vaporize entire cities, but she had faced a lot worse.

"It sounds doable," she said. "If they sick their satellites on me, I should be able to keep them occupied long enough for you to get a lock on their signal. Then we can trace them, right?"

"Right," Bruce confirmed. "And no matter where they hide, we will find them."

The expression on his face was quite scary.

"So assuming we get this confrontation with the Four, do we know whether we'll be able to win it?"

Everyone looked at Helena. That was a good point.

"What kind of powers do the Four have?" Diana asked Bruce.

"We don't know for certain, but with all the data we've compiled over the years we do have some pretty good guesses."

He manipulated the controls again, showing a picture of William Leather as he looked before the space flight.

"Data gathered from known Leather sightings indicate that he has some kind of fire-based powers. Possibly a firestarter or pyrokinetic. We also suspect he's capable of personal flight."

An image of Kim Süskind replaced Leather.

"Süskind is the Four's infiltration and sabotage expert. We know she's been able to come and go wherever she pleases, even in the most heavily secured facilities on this planet. This has led us to believe that she has some kind of stealth power. We also know that people she has personally killed were usually found with ... ruptured bodies. She's either very strong or some sort of telekinetic."

Jacob Green was next.

"There have been no sightings of Green since the space flight. What little we know leads us to suspect that he, unlike the other three, no longer possesses a human appearance. Meaning he can only operate in remote regions. We do know that he single-handedly exterminated an entire tribe in Africa in order for the Four to get their hands on some sort of special metal native to that region. He might be the most dangerous of the quartet."

Finally there was only Randall Dowling left.

"We know absolutely nothing about Dowling's powers. He's a genius-level intellect and will probably use all kinds of weapons, but apart from that..." Bruce shrugged.

"Not the best kind of intel," Dick said, looking worried. "And with our two heaviest hitters not in their best shape…"

"We'll manage," Diana cut him off. "These Four have shied away from any kind of personal combat, preferring to let others do their dirty work. From what I've gathered they have never been in any sort of battle situation where the odds were even remotely even. They might be powerful, but I doubt they know anything about fighting."

"That's nothing more than a guess, Diana," Bruce said. "Not one here has ever encountered the Four in person. We only know that all who did are now dead."

"As will the Four be when I am done with them," Diana growled, then stormed out.

For a minute everyone was silent, contemplating the enraged Amazon who had just left the room. Then Bruce looked at Kara.

"You should rest and recover some more," he said, his voice carrying a tinge of sadness. "I don't know how much time the Four will give us, but it won't be much. Soon they will start and arrange some sort of situation to draw you out. We need to beat them to the punch."

Kara nodded. "I think I'll be more or less recovered in another two days." Looking after Diana, she added "I'm gonna go and catch some sunlight."

Everyone else also left before long, thinking about what was ahead of them. In two days they would try and draw out the Four. And God alone knew whether any of them would survive to tell about it.

---------------------------------

**TO BE CONTINUED**


End file.
